Andy Grove, the Silicon Valley elder statesman, who made Intel Corp into the world’s top chipmaker and helped usher in the personal computer age, died yesterday, aged 79, Intel said.
The company did not describe the circumstances of his death, but Grove, who endured the Nazi occupation of Hungary during World War II, living under a fake name, and went to the US to escape the chaos of Soviet rule, had suffered from Parkinson’s disease.
Grove was Intel’s first hire after it was founded in 1968 and became the practical-minded member of a triumvirate that eventually led “Intel Inside” processors to be used in more than 80 percent of the world’s personal computers.
With his motto “only the paranoid survive,” which became the title of his best-selling management book, Grove championed an innovative environment within Intel that became a blueprint for successful California startups.
Grove, who was named “Man of the Year” by Time magazine in 1997, encouraged disagreement and insisted employees be vigilant of disruptions in industry and technology that could be major dangers — or opportunities — for Intel. In doing so, he could be mercurial and demanding with employees who he thought were not doing enough — in 1981, he demanded staff work two extra hours per day with no extra pay.
Grove’s overhaul of Intel’s business — switching from digital memory to processors — was an early example of his obsession with detecting major shifts in business and technology, and staying flexible enough to move quickly and make the most of them.
“It is not that you should not plan, but you should not regard your plans to be anything more than a baseline model of what might happen,” Grove said.
While Intel founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore proposed much of the chip technology that helped create the semiconductor industry, Grove was the stickler for detail, who turned their ideas into actual products. He was responsible for driving growth in Intel’s profits and stock price through the 1980s and 1990s.
Grove became Intel’s president in 1979, chief executive officer in 1987, and chairman and CEO in 1997. He gave up his CEO title in 1998 and stayed on as chairman until 2004.
In its early years, Intel focused on making DRAM memory chips. When Japanese competition soared, Grove made the fateful decision to reinvent Intel as a manufacturer of microprocessors — the brains at the center of personal computers and other electronic devices.
As the PC industry took off in the 1980s, Intel supplied its processors to IBM Corp and then to Compaq Computer Corp and other manufacturers making “IBM clone” PCs.
Intel’s chips, along with Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system, quickly became an industry standard in the exploding PC industry, with Grove funneling profits into research and development to create increasingly faster processors. Under his stewardship, the Pentium brand and “Intel Inside” logo became widely recognized by consumers.
Intel remains one of the world’s leading semiconductor companies, but the PC chipmaker is wrestling to adapt to trends toward smaller gadgets, such as smartphones and tablets.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained