Four things you didn’t know about Intel, AMD and NVIDIA.
Contents
- 1.- The founders of AMD and Intel worked together
- 2.- The motto of Andrew Grove, the second longest-serving CEO at Intel and the one with the most success, was “Only the paranoid survive.”
- 3.- The motto of Jerry Sanders, founder of AMD and the CEO who lasted the longest was “People first, products and benefits will come later.”
- 4.- Jen-Hsun Huang worked at AMD before co-founding NVIDIA and becoming its president and CEO.
Without a doubt, three of the most iconic manufacturers in the history of hardware are Intel, AMD and NVIDIA. Today we echo an article published by WCCFTech that has inspired us to write this article and tell you four rather curious things that you surely did not know about these three manufacturers.
We start from the beginning of history, before Intel, AMD or NVIDIA even existed. It all started with a Silicon Valley company called Fairchild Semiconductor and the considered genius Robert Noyce, the first to be able to use an integrated circuit on a commercial level, a genius who acted under the same roof as the well-known Gordon Moore, author of the law of moore.
With these two characters presented, it is time to start with the four curiosities that we have promised you.
1.- The founders of AMD and Intel worked together
And it is precisely in the company that we have presented to you a moment ago, Fairchild Semiconductor. Both Noyce and Moore worked on it side by side before each decided to go their own way and found separate companies. And it is that Fairchild grew a lot to become Fairchild Camera and Instrument, leaving the semiconductor division as a subsidiary.
At the end of the 60’s the atmosphere changed a lot, the company began to lose “bellows” because they did not know how to adequately reward and promote the innovations they created. This caused Robert Noyce to decide to leave and convinced Gordon Moore to go with him. Together, they founded Intel in 1968. A year later, Jerry Sanders, who also worked at Fairchild, decided to follow in the footsteps of Noyce and Moore and found his own company, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in 1969.
2.- The motto of Andrew Grove, the second longest-serving CEO at Intel and the one with the most success, was “Only the paranoid survive.”
Robert Noyce recruited Andrew Grove the same day Intel was founded, making him the company’s first employee. Grove belonged to a middle-class Hungarian family that survived the Holocaust of World War II, and at age 20 he left Hungary for the United States where he began his education as a chemical engineer.
Grove was the president of Intel between 1979 and 1987, the year in which he succeeded Gordon Moore as CEO of the company. Given his upbringing, he focused his efforts on the manufacturing side rather than the business side, and was able to expand all of Intel’s factories from a company with a couple of small factories, to the largest semiconductor manufacturer that is a today.
3.- The motto of Jerry Sanders, founder of AMD and the CEO who lasted the longest was “People first, products and benefits will come later.”
The slogan speaks for itself, and to this day it continues to be one of AMD’s core philosophies along with another of Sanders’ own mottos, “Either you research, or you produce, or you innovate”. And this has remained deeply rooted in the company, since since he founded AMD in 1969 he has been its CEO until 2002. During his tenure, AMD’s market capitalization rose from 1,505 million to more than 30,000 million dollars.
4.- Jen-Hsun Huang worked at AMD before co-founding NVIDIA and becoming its president and CEO.
Despite the origins of his name, Huang studied electrical engineering at the University of Oregon from the early age of 16. He graduated at 21 and married his lab partner, Lori, with whom he co-founded NVIDIA in 1993. Before that, Huang worked at a handful of familiar companies, including LSI Logic and AMD, where he worked. for two years and was involved in the design of some of their microprocessors.
According to a statement from Jen-Hsun Huang, the enormous difficulty in manufacturing processors that he encountered at LSI Logic was what motivated him to join AMD and look for more attractive chip design tools, and his time there made him fall in love with the processors. microprocessors. Now, as you know, Huang even has the NVIDIA logo tattooed on one arm.
According to Huang, before embarking on any business, anyone should ask themselves these three questions: Is it going to be profitable? Will it be complicated? And most importantly, will you enjoy it?
