Intel the CPU Company

This is the fourth entry in a multipart series. You may be interested to read about Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild Semiconductor, the start of Intel, and the rise of the 8086. At the start of the 1980s, Intel was in the absolute best position possible for a microprocessor manufacturer. They’d won IBM’s business with 8088, and they had around another 5000 customers for the 8086/8088. While the company was undoubtedly enjoying this success, they did have one failure. At the end of 1981, the company released what they’d intended to be the future of the microprocessor business, the iAPX 432. This was the first attempt to implement object orientation in silicon, was Intel’s first attempt at a 32bit CPU, and Intel did far more than just those two things. The 432 additionally moved process scheduling, interprocess communication, garbage collection, and storage allocation into hardware. At the hardware level, the CPU (here called the General Data Processor, or GDP) was built of two 64-pin ... Read full article.