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Like his fellow wealth builders of the digital age, Grove's mission is his product, and he shuns the philosophical mantle and higher callings often adopted by titans of an earlier era. Ask him to ruminate on issues like the role of technology in our society, and his pixie face contorts into a frozen smile with impatient eyes. "Technology happens," he clips. "It's not good, it's not bad. Is steel good or bad?" The steel in his own character comes through at such moments. He has a courageous passion alloyed with an engineer's analytic coldness, whether it be in battling his prostate cancer or in guiding Intel's death-defying climb to dominate the market for the world's most important product.
These traits have allowed Grove to push with paranoiac obsession the bounds of innovation and to build Intel, which makes nearly 90% of the planet's PC microprocessors, into a company worth $115 billion (more than IBM), with $5.1 billion in annual profits (seventh most profitable in the world) and an annual return to investors of 44% during the past 10 years. Other great entrepreneurs, most notably the visionary wizard Bill Gates, have become richer and better known by creating the software that makes use of the microchip. But more than any other person, Andy Grove has made real the defining law of the digital age: the prediction by his friend and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that microchips would double in power and halve in price every 18 months or so. And to that law Grove has added his own: we will continually find new things for microchips to do that were scarcely imaginable a year or two earlier.
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1997
ONE CHIP: 7.5 MILLION TRANSISTORS
JOHN MEYER FOR TIME
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The result is one of the great statistical zingers of our age: every month, 4 quadrillion transistors are produced, more than half a million for every human on the planet. Intel's space-suited workers etch more than 7 million, in lines one four-hundredth the thickness of a human hair, on each of its thumbnail-size Pentium II chips, which sell for about $500 and can make 588 million calculations a second.
The dawn of a new millennium--which is the grandest measure we have of human time--permits us to think big about history. We can pause to notice what Grove calls, somewhat inelegantly, "strategic inflection points," those moments when new circumstances alter the way the world works, as if the current of history goes through a transistor and our oscilloscopes blip. It can happen because of an invention (Gutenberg's printing press in the 15th century), or an idea (individual liberty in the 18th century), or a technology (electricity in the 19th century) or a process (the assembly line early in this century).
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