Intel Advert - December 1993

Intel didn't do a huge amount of advertising, seeming to prefer to allow word-of-mouth, or inertia, to do its selling.

In the early 1970s, it had the hobbyist and microcomputer market - such as it was - mostly to itself, which was perhaps fair enough as it was credited with inventing the first commercial microprocessors - the 4004 and the 8008 - and then set the standard with its 8080, then 8085 - a 5 volt version which was cheaper and easier to build around.

Then, in 1974, Intel employee - and co-designer of the 8080 - Frederico Faggin left to start rival chip company Zilog, which launched its 8080-compatible-but-much-cheaper Z80 in 1976.

The Z80 was one of two processors, along with MOS Technology's 6502, which came to dominate the home computer market through to the mid 1980s, however whilst the Z80 was also popular in business machines, at least at the budget end of the market, Intel remained a constant presence.

That presence became more of a dominance after IBM chose the Intel 8088 - a version of Intel's latest 16-bit 8086 chip which only had an 8-bit data bus - for its 5150 PC, launched in 1981.

This machine - better known as the IBM PC - defined the industry for a generation, with various iterations of the same x86 architecture - the 80186, 80286, '386 and the chip of the advert - the 80486 - appearing in not just IBM's PCs, but more significantly the millions of clone versions of the IBM.

Meanwhile, AMD - a company founded in 1969 as one of several spin-off "Fairchildren" to come out of Fairchild Semiconductor - had been quietly manufacturing memory chips and working as a second-sourcer for companies like National Semiconductor and, later on, Intel itself.

This came about because IBM required that there was a second source of chips for its 5150 PC, and so a contract was signed in 1982 between the two companies, with AMD going on to produce 8086, 8088, 80186 and 80286 chips under licence.

At some point, AMD started branding its 80286 copy as the Am286, but significantly it was producing them with higher clock speeds than Intel's original, a situation which started to affect Intel's bottom line.

So by the time the 80386 rolled around, Intel decided to exclude AMD from its latest design, with AMD taking over five years to reverse engineer it. When it did finally release the Am386, it once again showed it could produce chips with faster speeds^[1].

The pattern continued right through to the release of AMD's Athlon processor at the end of the 1990s - considered as AMDs zenith - matched all the while by a declining share for Intel.

However, poor management, an over-valued buyout of graphics board maker ATI, and Intel's monopolistic behaviour in paying PC manufacturers to keep AMD chips out - part of which involved paying towards a company's advertising if it used the "Intel Inside" branding - led to something of a downfall for AMD in the first decade of the 21st century.

Meanwhile, the advert itself - which perhaps represents part of Intel's reaction to increasing competition from AMD - is notable for a couple of other things.

First, the 486 marked the end of the maths co-processor - the chip which was often built as an optional extra to go along with early processors (e.g. the 8087 went with the 8086, etc) in order to improve a computer's ability to work with floating point numbers - as the 486 effectively contained its own on-board maths co-processor.

And secondly, the advert also shows how the games industry was by now driving the PC business as much, if not more, than business software.

Processor power had long since exceeded the requirements for spreadsheets and word processors, but games would make as much use of processor power as there was available, and then some. For many years, Microsoft's Flight Simulator was both a benchmark for how compatible a PC clone was to a "real" IBM, and for how well it performed overall.

PCs as gaming platforms continue - along with AI more recently - to drive PC development, especially graphics cards, today.