Andy Grove, the former Intel Corp chief executive whose youth under Nazi occupation and escape from the Iron Curtain inspired an "only the paranoid survive" style that saved the chip maker from financial ruin in the 1980s, has died.
He was 79.
Intel said he died on Monday. It did not specify a cause of death.
Grove, who was instrumental in building Intel into the world's largest chip company during his 37-year career there, had suffered from Parkinson's disease. He also suffered from prostate cancer in the mid-1990s.
He was a mercurial but visionary leader who helped position Intel's microprocessors as the central technology inside personal computers.
Grove's bet-the-company gamble - moving Intel from memory chips to microprocessors in the mid-1980s to serve what was still a fledgling PC industry - helped rescue Intel from a financial crisis and set it on course to becoming one of the most important technology companies of all time.
"Andy made the impossible happen, time and again, and inspired generations of technologists, entrepreneurs, and business leaders," Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich said.
Robert Burgelman, a professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business who started teaching management classes with Grove in the late 1980s, called Grove "one of the most incisive thinkers that I have ever come across".
He said Grove's technical and strategic abilities were critical in building Intel and fending off threats from Asian competitors.
Intel created the world's first commercial microprocessor in 1971, but the company's primary focus was memory chips for mainframe computers. That was until the personal computer was invented and a new use for Intel's microprocessors emerged.
Grove's leadership of that transition affirmed his status as a key figure in the digital revolution.
A Hungarian refugee born Andras Istvan Grof, he fled to America in 1957 and Westernised his name.
A Jew growing up in Nazi-occupied Hungary, he survived the Holocaust by moving frequently as a child, boarding with family friends and taking on an assumed name.
As the defeat of the Nazis opened the door for a brutal Stalinist regime, he made his escape in a daring run for the Austrian border.
Grove migrated to the US at age 20, a penniless refugee who would go on to amass a personal fortune believed to be worth about $US400 million ($A527 milion), according to Forbes magazine.
He enrolled at the City College of New York, where he studied engineering.
He moved west with his wife, Eva, and earned a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, after which Grove landed his first post-PhD job at Fairchild Semiconductor, founded by the "traitorous eight" employees who left William Shockley's legendary Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory.
Two of the eight, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, went on to found Intel.
Grove was Intel's third employee, though Intel considers him one of the California company's founders.
Grove stepped down as Intel's CEO in 1998, and relinquished his chairman title in 2005.
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