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Intel's longtime President and CEO Andy Grove has died. He was 79, and was Intel's first hire. Born in pre-war Hungary, he survived both the Nazi occupation and Communist rule to immigrate to America at the age of 20.
Present at Intel's 1968 founding with Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, Andy Grove became Intel's President in 1979 and CEO in 1987. He served as Chairman of the Board from 1997 to 2005. Both during his time at Intel and in retirement, Grove was one of the most influential figures in technology and business, writing best-selling books and widely cited articles, and speaking out on an array of prominent public issues.
"We are deeply saddened by the passing of former Intel Chairman and CEO Andy Grove," said Intel CEO Brian Krzanich. "Andy made the impossible happen, time and again, and inspired generations of technologists, entrepreneurs, and business leaders."
Grove played a critical role in the decision to move Intel's focus from memory chips to microprocessors and led the firm's transformation into a widely recognized consumer brand. Under his leadership Intel produced the chips, including the 386 and Pentium, which helped usher in the PC era. The company also increased annual revenues from $1.9 billion to more than $26 billion.
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Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday March 22 2016, @02:17AM
My point was it didn't usher in the PC era. The PC era was already comfortably seated by the time the 386 came out.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Tuesday March 22 2016, @02:46AM
It was the first 32 bit IBM-compatible processor, no? We still live with many of its design decisions today.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 22 2016, @01:31PM
I think his point was the IBM PC era.
At the time it was not clear which way it was going to go. I happened to *guess* correctly it was IBMPC clones. With the right deals here and there it could have easily gone to commodore or apple, with their Motorola cores.
I think we are seeing another change of CPU architecture. Oh x86 is not going away by any means (too many of them out there). But ARM is where all the cool kids play these days.