INTC Intel Corporation

By Don Clark 

Andrew S. Grove, the Holocaust survivor who turned Intel Corp. into one of high tech's most influential trendsetters, died at the age of 79.

No cause of death was immediately disclosed. Mr. Grove, who successfully fought a well-publicized battle against prostate cancer, had suffered from Parkinson's disease in recent years.

The Hungarian-born executive, Time magazine's Man of the Year in 1997, helped Intel weather a transition from supplying memory chips--a commodity product facing tough competition from Asia--into the dominant maker of microprocessors that serve as the calculating engines for personal computers. Along the way, Mr. Grove helped turn Intel into one of the few consumer brands to emerge from the semiconductor industry.

Born András Gróf in Budapest, and later known as Andy, Mr. Grove was schooled in electrical engineering and received a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He joined Fairchild Semiconductor and later Intel after it was founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore in 1968.

Though not a founder of the Silicon Valley company, Mr. Grove put a decisive stamp on it. While Mr. Noyce became the chip industry's statesman and Mr. Moore its most famous engineer, Mr. Grove supplied discipline and management skill that he would later incorporate in books and courses he taught at Stanford University.

His management books include "High Output Management," "One on One With Andy Grove," and "Only the Paranoid Survive." His later memoir, "Swimming Across," detailed his experience in Budapest during World War II and during the Hungarian Revolution before he escaped to the U.S.

Mr. Grove was Intel's CEO from 1987 to 1998 and its president from 1979 to 1997. He served as chairman from May 1997 to May 2005.

He and his wife, Eva, were married for 58 years and had two daughters and eight grandchildren.

Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 21, 2016 21:29 ET (01:29 GMT)

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