Five hundred employees and guests crowded under a white tent half the length of a football field at Intel Corp.'s Santa Clara, California, headquarters as Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini put his company's newest line of computer chips through their paces.

``These are the best microprocessors we've ever designed, the best microprocessors we've ever built,'' Otellini told the audience. ``This is not just incremental change; it's a revolutionary leap.''

Otellini's pronouncement relegated to obsolescence Intel's Pentium chip, which once powered more than 80 percent of the world's personal computers. That wasn't the only surprise last July.

A camera zoomed in on engineers in lab coats in Haifa, Israel. The video revealed that the chip Intel is counting on to recover from a battering by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. wasn't invented in Silicon Valley. Instead, Intel is betting on a group of Israeli mavericks and a design bureau 7,400 miles (11,900 kilometers) away.

Shmuel Eden, former head of the Israel Development Center where the new Core 2 Duo was created, says he's fed up with the perception that Intel's prowess is fading...

... Frohman persuaded Grove to sign off on a center in Israel in 1974 -- and went on to become general manager of Intel Israel until he retired in 2001. He pushed for a location near Technion to take advantage of a supply of engineers and the cachet of the university, which Albert Einstein helped found in 1924.

The outpost put itself on the map in 1981 when the Israelis created a cheaper version of Intel's 8086 processor, renamed the 8088. In 1981, IBM chose the chip to power its first personal computer...

...Today, Israel has more scientists and engineers, proportional to its population, than any other country -- 145 for every 10,000 people compared with 85 per 10,000 in the U.S., according to Israel21C, a nonprofit organization aimed at teaching Americans about Israel...