Intel 8088

In 1974 Intel opened its first design center outside the United States in Haifa, led by Dov Frohman, the Israeli engineer who had invented the EPROM memory chip at Intel. The Haifa team designed the 8088, released in 1979: a version of Intel's 16-bit 8086 with an 8-bit external data bus, which let computer makers use cheaper, widely available support chips. That economy is why IBM chose it, running at 4.77 MHz, for its first Personal Computer in August 1981.

The IBM PC and its many clones made the x86 architecture the standard of personal computing, so a chip designed in Haifa sits at the root of the PC industry. Intel Israel went on to design the Pentium MMX, the Pentium M behind the Centrino laptop platform and the Core processors that followed, and it grew into one of Israel's largest employers and exporters.