Intel Corporation

Intel is the semiconductor company Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore founded in 1968 after leaving Fairchild Semiconductor — maker of the first commercial microprocessor (the 4004, 1971) and, later, of the Pentium processor whose 1994 floating-point division defect became one of the most public chip recalls in the industry's history.

Intel acts, rather than merely appears, across three otherwise-separate clusters in this vault: it fabricated the DARPA/ONR-funded Ni1000 neural chip as Fairchild's corporate offspring; it employed Ted Hoff, architect of the 4004; and its own engineers wrote the primary account of the FDIV bug's cause, before the company took a $475M charge to recall the affected chips.

Updates

• 2026-08-27: Thomas Nicely's own 30 October 1994 e-mail records that when he called Intel Tech Support on 24 October (call reference number 51270), the contact person said "no such bug had been previously reported or observed" — a claim in tension with Nicely's later account (2011 FAQ, memory-based) that an Intel program manager told him the company's own P6 FPU test team had already found a similar flaw internally in May or June 1994. (claim-nicely-twin-prime-project-surfaced-pentium-fdiv-bug, claim-nicely-2011-faq-corroborates-1994-dates-but-is-a-memory-reconstruction)

References

• claim-pentium-fdiv-bug-five-missing-srt-lookup-table-entries
• claim-intel-475m-charge-pentium-fdiv-recall
• claim-intel-fairchild-spinout-built-the-darpa-funded-ni1000
• claim-ni1000-neural-chip-funded-by-darpa-and-onr
• claim-ted-hoff-widrow-phd-student-architected-intel-4004
• claim-intel-1994-white-paper-estimated-fdiv-bug-once-per-27000-years