Kontich, july 3, 2002 - Intel today celebrates the industry reaching the milestone of 1 billion PCs shipped, following industry analyst firm Gartner Dataquest's announcement today. This is a major milestone in the history of an industry that has transformed the world in about 25 years .
The first commercially successful and widely available PC, the Altair, was launched in 1974, powered by an Intel 8080 chip. But Intel's contribution to the evolution of personal computing began with its 1971 invention of the microprocessor.
Innovation
This path of innovation leads from the Intel 8080 chip used in the Altair to the 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 processor that powered the watershed IBM PC in 1981 and into the era of the Intel(r) Pentium(r) 4 processor. This is the world's fastest processor delivering speeds of up to 2.53 GHz. 25 years ago, PCs were big, clunky and enabled simple word processing and basic spreadsheets. The billionth PC of today is likely to enable its owner to send e-mail and instant messages, surf the Web, manage a household budget, edit home movies, burn them onto DVDs, mix digital music, create photo albums featuring narration and background music and play action-packed games - uses inconceivable when people started snapping up Altairs.
The journey to the 1 billion milestone, has seen the PC profoundly change the way companies transact business and how people communicate, shop, learn, access information and entertain themselves. It is now found in 49% of Western European households and at the end of 2001 nearly half a billion people worldwide had home access to the Internet . "The PC is so versatile and so good at so many things," said Martin Reynolds, vice president at Gartner Dataquest and author of the analyst firm's report on the 1 billionth PC. "It's become something that almost everybody has to have."
"At Intel, we passionately want to deliver the technologies that change the world," said Pat Gelsinger, vice president and chief technology officer at Intel. "If you consider that PC technologies today have touched a billion people, that's fairly impressive. But there are five billion lives that we haven't touched yet. And we are driven every day by the opportunity to deliver the innovations that will reach the vast worldwide population of potential users of our technology."
Another Billion in Five to Six Years
Gartner Dataquest calculates that the next billion PCs could ship far
faster than those that came before. Between 2007 and 2008, the PC
industry is projected to reach the milestone of 2 billion PCs, with the greatest growth opportunity coming from high-volume emerging markets in places such as China, Latin America, Eastern Europe and India.
Intel believes that as technology goes increasingly global, the focus must remain on developing the faster, more powerful processor technologies that users covet, while enabling "anytime, anywhere" computing and making PCs more intuitive and easier to use.
"Today, humans have to work with computers on the computer's terms," explained Gelsinger. "Tomorrow, we want to make computers work with humans on their terms. That vision includes developing PCs that can recognize speech, gestures and video, and it means achieving breakthroughs that will make the interaction between people and computers a truly immersive experience in the future."
"Ultimately, we envisage a world in which billions of people are seamlessly connected to the Internet, all the time and anywhere, with a rich set of services that are enabled by wireless technologies," Gelsinger said.
Noot voor de redactie: Beeldmateriaal van Intel processors en van het 25-jarig bestaan van de PC is verkrijgbaar via www.mcsonline.nl/pers
Intel is 's werelds grootste chipfabrikant en een vooraanstaand producent van personal computer-, netwerk- en communicatieproducten.
Meer informatie over Intel is te vinden op: http://www.intel.com/pressroom/.
Voor meer informatie: Monogram Communication Strategies (MCS) BV, Marieke Leenhouts, telefoon +31 (0)23 562 82 08.