Intel Co-Founder Andrew S. Grove Has Passed Away

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Intel announced that the company’s former CEO and Chairman Andrew S. Grove passed away today at the age of 79. 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.” Born András Gróf in Budapest, Hungary, Grove immigrated to the United States in 1956-7 having survived Nazi occupation and escaped Soviet repression. He studied chemical engineering at the City College of New York, completing his Ph.D at the University of California at Berkeley in 1963. After graduation, he was hired by Gordon Moore at Fairchild Semiconductor as a researcher and rose to assistant head of R&D under Moore. When Noyce and Moore left Fairchild to found Intel in 1968, Grove was their first hire.
 
"Grove played a critical role in the decision to move Intel’s focus from memory chips to microprocessors..."

A moment in time that could've gone either way.
 
I joined Intel right after Grove took over. He was a great leader and helped turn Intel around after their disastrous time in the mid 80's. I enjoyed watching his updates for the company and he had a true vision of where the market was headed and what Intel could do to support it. One of his ideas that really stuck with me (and highlights the problems we have with performance today) was the technology spiral. The hardware manufacturers build more powerful hardware that allows software designers to push into new frontiers that requires new and faster hardware (rinse and repeat). It was that model that established the PC renaissance we had in the 90s and 2000s. Hopefully we can get back to that again someday. A real class act and amazing CEO/CoB. RIP Andy Grove.
 
The brains behind Intel was an amazing bunch of guys. They started by working for Shockley. YES, the guy credited with the invention of the semiconductor transistor. Most say he "grabbed the credit" though.
Shockley was one of those "my way or the highway" asses that didn't like free thinking or thinking outside the box. Most of the entire group of engineers split from the company at once. They got backing from Fairchild starting Fairchild semiconductors. These guys created a viable integrated circuit (IC) that was the cornerstone for all future IC and microprocessors. A few years later led by Noyce a few left Fairchild and started Intel and the rest is history. By the way. Another group of top brains from Fairchild left and started their own company a year later. That company was AMD.
Exciting days for sure.
 
kbrickley said:
I joined Intel right after Grove took over. He was a great leader and helped turn Intel around after their disastrous time in the mid 80's.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that was the time of the simultaneous cold reception for the ungodly expensive iAPX, and the only moderately expensive 80286.

Intel iAPX 432 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Intel 80286 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The 80286 was more powerful than the iAPX for most use cases and didn't require porting of software. Pretty sad considering iAPX required multiple chips to do the same thing.

And although the 286 was a performance improvement over the 8086, it was the same old 16-bit paging core as the 8086 with broken memory protection mode tacked-on. It wasn't so well received by developers, and the high price made it a hard sell for consumers. Hell, even the Motorola 68000 had a clear path forward to 32-bit (even if the ALU was only 16-bit)!

Andy Grove had a bloodbath on his hands, and the fact that he cleaned it all up in less than a decade is a testament to his brilliant management. By the time the 486 was released in 1989, x86 had no major weaknesses.
 
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defaultluser said:
Yeah, that was the time of the simultaneous cold reception for the ungodly expensive iAPX, and the only moderately expensive 80286.

Intel iAPX 432 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Intel 80286 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The 80286 was more powerful than the iAPX for most use cases and didn't require porting of software. Pretty sad considering iAPX required multiple chips to do the same thing.

And although the 286 was a performance improvement over the 8086, it was the same old 16-bit paging core as the 8086 with broken memory protection mode tacked-on. It wasn't so well received by developers, and the high price made it a hard sell for consumers. Hell, even the Motorola 68000 had a clear path forward to 32-bit (even if the ALU was only 16-bit)!

Andy Grove had a bloodbath on his hands, and the fact that he cleaned it all up in less than a decade is a testament to his brilliant management. By the time the 486 was released in 1989, x86 had no major weaknesses.
Click to expand...
Grove was more of the marketing genius certainly and with the operational lead (Barrett) behind him he was able to leverage Intel to be positioned for the explosion of the PC in the 90's. I remember several of his quarterly business updates that he gave the company over the years. One of the annual goals at the start of the boom was to "make the PC ubiquitous" (the only reason I know that word :cool:). Because the boom accelerated so fast they decided that they achieved that goal before the year was out. The next year's goal was more of a marketing speak one "make the PC it". That was right around the time of the B-step Pentium fiasco that really taught Intel how to market their product and led to the "Intel Inside" program. It also was the start of Intel actually monitoring the Internet chatter and posting monthly summaries of any key activities they saw in the message boards. My favorite section of the updates was "The Religious Wars" (the arguments between Intel, AMD, and Apple folks) which went about how they go today :)
 
kbrickley said:
One of his ideas that really stuck with me (and highlights the problems we have with performance today) was the technology spiral. The hardware manufacturers build more powerful hardware that allows software designers to push into new frontiers that requires new and faster hardware (rinse and repeat). It was that model that established the PC renaissance we had in the 90s and 2000s. Hopefully we can get back to that again someday. A real class act and amazing CEO/CoB. RIP Andy Grove.
Click to expand...

Agreed, and RIP to Andy. Unfortunately it is much harder to pull this off today because while technology is now pervasive it is also at different levels all over the place.

Look at PCs and consoles, for example. Despite NVIDIA and AMD releasing newer hardware all the time, it doesn't necessarily drive the creation of games that can push the hardware to its limit. Far Cry 4 is a textbook example of what I mean. A 3 year old video card can give you a perfectly acceptable gaming experience thanks to Ubisoft's (terrible) decision to target consoles, and many companies are doing this. They are then rewarded with terrific sales and have no motivation to push the limits for their future titles. The gaming market is bigger than ever but also more diverse. Consoles, phones, tablets, etc., all get to have their say. The only way to create a cycle in this kind of climate is to drive it from all angles, which is extremely difficult. And that was just using a specific example of gaming.

I would love to see a hardware/software cycle come back and drive innovation. We can see different companies (MS, Apple, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and many more) trying to pull this off now. Ultimately it will probably need a group of companies working in concert, perhaps with various hardware and software standards, to pull this off. I hope we can enter a cycle like this again because as it stands I have a 4 year old PC that I have no reason to upgrade as performance gained per dollar spent would be pretty bad.
 
PiSquared said:
Agreed, and RIP to Andy. Unfortunately it is much harder to pull this off today because while technology is now pervasive it is also at different levels all over the place.

Look at PCs and consoles, for example. Despite NVIDIA and AMD releasing newer hardware all the time, it doesn't necessarily drive the creation of games that can push the hardware to its limit. Far Cry 4 is a textbook example of what I mean. A 3 year old video card can give you a perfectly acceptable gaming experience thanks to Ubisoft's (terrible) decision to target consoles, and many companies are doing this. They are then rewarded with terrific sales and have no motivation to push the limits for their future titles. The gaming market is bigger than ever but also more diverse. Consoles, phones, tablets, etc., all get to have their say. The only way to create a cycle in this kind of climate is to drive it from all angles, which is extremely difficult. And that was just using a specific example of gaming.

I would love to see a hardware/software cycle come back and drive innovation. We can see different companies (MS, Apple, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and many more) trying to pull this off now. Ultimately it will probably need a group of companies working in concert, perhaps with various hardware and software standards, to pull this off. I hope we can enter a cycle like this again because as it stands I have a 4 year old PC that I have no reason to upgrade as performance gained per dollar spent would be pretty bad.
Click to expand...
We are definitely missing another paradigm shift. The 90's drove so much of the hardware performance because it was one new paradigm after another: discrete soundcards, discrete video cards, 3D video, CD ROMs, DVD, etc. The 2000's had paradigm shifts in video resolution (640x480 was still the standard at the start of 2000 for many games) and in hard drives but other than the multicore aspects of the chips we had seen most of the big onboard hardware changes in the previous decade.

I suspect that VR is probably the next paradigm shift in computing, since it will have an enormous impact on both hardware and software, if it succeeds. But other than that I don't see anything as paradigm shifting as all the technologies in the 90's were. I still remember my first CDROM with the 7th Guest game (game is tame by modern standards but as one of the first CDROM titles it was jaw dropping for it's day). Playing Quake with a video card rather than onboard graphics was equally amazing, as was playing games with discrete sound and speakers. Although I am not as much of an early adopter anymore I do hope that VR succeeds and takes PC computing to new heights of hardware and software capabilities.
 
Yeah, the last killer app people had to have was HD video playback. When Blu-ray hit in 2006, high-bitrate h.264 killed a brand-new Core 2 Duo! But just a few years later every major video card had acceleration, including Nvidia and AMD integrated graphics.

As a sign of it's recognition of importance, h.265 4k video has already received hardware acceleration from all three vendors BEFORE the discs are even available to purchase! I'm sure this will make the players a whole lot cheaper, having fixed-function decoders already available!

We're still waiting for the next killer app to break through the waves though.
 
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"Only the paranoid survive"

I guess he wasn't paranoid enough.
 
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