Intel Architecture Labs

IAL was created by Intel Vice-president Ron Whittier together with Craig Kinnie and Steven McGeady to develop the hardware and software innovations considered to be lacking from PC original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and Microsoft in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Intel, whose microprocessors powered PC hardware designs, invested heavily in improving the performance of its chips.

This strategy was fundamental to Intel's vision of a powerful central microprocessor made with its advanced chip building capabilities.

NSP was, in that regard, a gold mine of power-hungry software workloads which were previously running on Digital Signal Processor chips.

Microsoft refused to put their support behind a competing standard such as NSP, especially one with the potential to level the OS playing field for PCs.

Despite this conflict, IAL continued to work on NSP, showing demonstrations of DSP software running smoothly on the central microprocessor.

Although NSP did not achieve commercial success like Direct X, the concepts, prototypes, and implementations of DSP algorithms on native Intel microprocessors was widely recognized as an impressive technological feat at the time, and indirectly supported the overall notion of moving dedicated software workloads to general purpose microprocessors like Intel's.

USB, in particular, was developed in the Oregon offices of IAL, where the architects of PCI and the Plug and Play initiatives assisted in building the first peripheral interconnect that would work with devices without requiring the PC to be dismantled.

In the early 1990s the initial USB specification was spearheaded in IAL, driven by a small team of software and hardware architects & engineers.

WDM was uniquely compatible with both operating systems, and the decision to abandon the VxD stack was a win-win for Intel and Microsoft.

The engineers were regular presenters at USB Developer's Conferences and collaborated with dozens of hardware and software companies who were eager to implement the industry's first broadly-adopted interconnect standard to make PCs more user friendly.