Word: chip
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...leadership into the world's pre-eminent microprocessor manufacturer. From a standing start in 1981, when IBM introduced the first personal computers, they have populated the planet at an astounding rate. And of the 83 million machines sold this year, nearly 90% get their kick from an Intel chip. So do antilock brakes, Internet servers, cell phones and digital cameras. And who knows what products not yet invented will be powered by the chip 10, 20 years from...
...been easy. A history of the semiconductor business reads like a chapter of the Iliad: Unisem, dead of obsolescence; Advanced Memory Systems, killed by management; Mostek, slaughtered in a Japanese RAM invasion. Intel has endured crippling chip recessions, one Federal Trade Commission probe and a nasty public flogging over its flawed Pentium chips in 1994. Now the prospect of cheaper computers using cheaper chips, not to mention the threat of economic troubles in Asia, looms. But no firm does more reliable (or profitable) work in the tiny molecular spaces that Intel has colonized. It is the essential firm...
...rewards made possible by some neck-snapping breakthroughs. The key to the success dated back to an insight Moore had in 1965. Sitting down with a piece of log paper and a ruler, he drew a simple graph. On the vertical axis he tracked the growing complexity of silicon chips, along the bottom he ticked off time, and then he plotted the points out a few years. The resulting line, he saw, showed that chip power doubled roughly every 24 months, even as costs fell by half. The rule (amended to 18 months) became known as Moore's law. Though...
...merits of that no-b.s. culture became clear as the world around Intel began to crack. Starting in 1976, the firm sailed into one iceberg after another: weak demand for memory chips, factory problems, ruthless Japanese "dumping." In 1981, when Intel steamed into yet another exhausting chip slowdown, Grove decided that instead of laying off employees he'd order Intel's staff to work 25% harder--two hours a day, every day, for free. The "125% solution" turned Santa Clara into a sweatshop (a few particularly dyspeptic engineers took to wearing sweatbands to highlight the point), but Grove...
...Grove's personality and the characteristics that had served him best over the years--courage in the face of fear, passion in the face of discomfort--had been transmitted like tiny electrons into the substrate of Intel's tens of thousands of employees. Grove had saved the chip. Next it was time to save himself...