San Francisco, March 22

Andy Grove, the Silicon Valley elder statesman who made Intel into world's top chipmaker and helped usher in personal computer age, died today at age 79, Intel said.

The firm did not describe circumstances of his death but Grove, who endured the Nazi occupation of Hungary during World War II, living under a fake name, and came to the United States to escape the chaos of Soviet rule, had suffered from Parkinson's.

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 over 80 per cent of 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 start-ups.

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 and in 1981 required staff to work two extra hours a 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's not that you shouldn't 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 chip technology that helped created semiconductor industry, Grove was stickler for detail who turned their ideas into actual products. He was responsible for driving growth in Intel’s profits and stock price through 1980s and 90s.

Andy Grove, who was Jewish, was born Andras Grof in Budapest in 1936. Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in his youth, and after the Soviets followed, Grove sneaked into Austria in 1956 and then emigrated to the US, where he learned English and earned a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.

Grove went to work in 1963 at Fairchild Semiconductor, where he also met Noyce and Moore, who left to found Intel in 1968. Grove quickly joined them.

He became Intel's president in 1979, CEO in 1987 and chairman and CEO in 1997. He gave up his CEO title in 1998 and stayed on as chairman until 2004.