Intel is an unglamorous company run by unglamorous people working out of offices and a location that match this description. Yet its seemingly unglamorous product, the microprocessor, is the keystone of Silicon Valley and the linchpin of the great technology-based economic structure that is centered there.

The company, led and populated by fanatical engineers, brought the microprocessor into fruition under co-founder Robert Noyce (pictured left), and the technology industry catchphrase into the zeitgeist through co-founder Gordon Moore’s (pictured right) “law” of technological manifest destiny.

It was nevertheless prescient enough by the early 90s (under Andy Grove, pictured center) to understand consumer marketing as well, by creating what appeared to be the simplistic slogan “Intel Inside” as a primary driver of its market value through its ability to instill confidence in consumers about the PCs they were buying.

Something this big is always a target. Long under fire from aggressive competition, and recently surpassed by some measures by arch-rival AMD, the company is, accordingly, famous in the business worlds for its “only the paranoid survive” mantra.

Now Intel is poised to take the next big leap of faith in itself and the markets it serves through what appears to be a major revamp of its symbolic presence. It is set to announce a new corporate logo, a redesign of the Intel Inside program, and is swapping out the Pentium name for a new “Core” brand.

The company, now under the leadership of Paul Otellini (pictured)--a former marketing exec rather than an engineer--has “had some fumbles” (as reported last year by SYS-CON) in recent years, and cannot be certain that the new era of multi-core processors in which it now lives will enable its continued success.

Although it is viewed in most quarters as a positive that Apple will be moving to Intel, the company nevertheless faces the multiple challenges of facing down the laws of physics (as its chips become every more tightly packed) and a changing technology industry that is spitting out new devices at a rate that seems to parallel Moore’s Law, during an the early years of an era where consumer electronics and computer geekdom are finally coalescing on a grand scale.

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