(Adds details, background)
* Presided over company's "Intel inside" growth
* Emigrated from Hungary to U.S.
* Kept most of Intel's chip-making work in U.S.
By Noel Randewich
SAN FRANCISCO, March 21 (Reuters) - Andy Grove, the Silicon Valley elder statesman who made Intel into the world's top chipmaker and helped usher in the personal computer age, died on Tuesday at age 79, Intel said.
The company did not describe the circumstances of his death but Grove, who endured the Nazi occupation of Hungary during World War Two, 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 more than 80 percent of the 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 startups.
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 the 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 the chip technology that helped created the semiconductor industry, Grove was the stickler for detail who turned their ideas into actual products. He was responsible for driving growth in Intel's profits and stock price through the 1980s and 1990s.
NAZIS, COMMUNISTS
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 United States, where he learned English and earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.