Former Intel Chief Executive Officer and Chairman Andrew Grove died on Monday at age 79, the technology company said in a statement.
The company however 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 leadership of that transition affirmed his status as a key figure in the digital revolution and an icon of business leadership, whose maneuvers have been studied and dissected in management classes around the world.
Grove was named Intel’s president in 1979, took the chief executive job in 1987 and in 1997 added the chairmanship to his duties. He stepped down as CEO in 1998, and relinquished his chairman title in 2005.