Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
See
Chapter 4
,
“
Motherboards and Buses
,”
p.
143
.
How did Intel come to dominate the interior of our PCs? Intel has been the dominant PC
processor supplier since IBM chose the Intel 8088 CPU in the original IBM PC in 1981.
By controlling the processor, Intel naturally controlled the chips necessary to integrate its
processors into system designs. This naturally led Intel into the chipset business. It star-
ted its chipset business in 1989 with the 82350 Extended Industry Standard Architecture
(EISA) chipset, and by 1993 it had become—along with the debut of the Pentium pro-
cessor—the largest-volume major motherboard chipset supplier. Now I imagine Intel sit-
ting there, thinking that it makes the processor and all the other chips necessary to pro-
duceamotherboard,sowhynotjusteliminatethemiddlemanandmaketheentiremother-
board, too? The answer to this, and a real turning point in the industry, came about in
1994 when Intel became the largest-volume motherboard manufacturer in the world. By
1997, Intel made more motherboards than the next eight largest motherboard manufactur-
ers combined, with sales of more than 30 million boards worth more than $3.6 billion!
After an industry downturn in 2001, Intel concentrated on its core competency of chip
making and began using Chinese contract manufacturers such as Foxconn to make Intel-
branded motherboards. Since then, contract manufacturers such as Asus, Foxconn, ECS,
MSI,andGigabytehaveessentiallytakenoverthemarketformotherboardmanufacturing.
Regardless of which company actually manufactures the boards, the main part of any
motherboard is the chipset, which contains the majority of the motherboard circuitry.
Thesedaysabout80%ofPCsonthemarketuseIntelprocessors,andthemajorityofthose
are plugged in to motherboards built using Intel chipsets.
Intel controls the PC hardware standard because it controls the PC motherboard and most
of the components on it. It not only makes the majority of motherboards being used in
systems today, but it also supplies the majority of processors and motherboard chipsets to
other motherboard manufacturers.
Intel also has had a hand in setting several recent PC hardware standards, such as the fol-
lowing:
• Universal serial bus (USB) for connecting peripheral devices.
• Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) local bus interface.
• Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) interface for higher-performance video cards than
could be implemented via PCI.
• PCI Express (originally known as 3GIO), the interface selected by the PCI Special In-
terest Group (PCI SIG) to replace both PCI and AGP as the high-performance bus for
PCs.
