Andrew Grove Intel’s Ceo Deals With Realities Of His Life And Of His Company’s

Breakfast at the elegant St. Regis Hotel, and the most powerful man in computer chips reaches into his bag and pulls out some Chex.

Not just cereal, mind you. Intel chief executive Andrew Grove has packed the squares in a homemade goop of dates, oat bran and soy powder. They are to swim in non-fat milk, he tells the tuxedo-clad waiter.

St. Regis, St. Schmegis.

Grove may seem the well-mannered, behind-the-scenes force in technology - Mr. Intel Inside - but polite appearances take a back seat when it comes to his health - and his company’s.

Forget the charming East European accent. A cancer survivor on a take-no-prisoners low-fat diet, Grove attacks the technology business with a similar zeal - always looking over his shoulder, trying to kick adversaries into line, and not afraid to make new ones along the way.

That aggressiveness is getting Intel Corp. - and by inference its 61-year-old leader - some unwanted attention. The U.S. government last month launched a broad probe into Intel’s practices to see if it’s unfairly monopolizing the computer chip business, an accusation Intel denies.

The scrutiny may make it easy to lump Grove with the nerdier leg of computing’s famous dupoly - Bill Gates of Microsoft Corp., which also faces an antitrust probe. After all, both men presided over the personal computer revolution, and today Intel chips and Microsoft software run the vast majority of the world’s PCs.

But Grove, about two decades Gates’ senior, defies easy technocrat molds.

Two years ago, the Intel chief didn’t just follow doctors’ orders when he was diagnosed with life-threatening prostate cancer. Relying on his skills as a semiconductor researcher, Grove studied the subject ad infinitum, queried doctors across the nation, weighed the odds of every major treatment, and finally chose a regime that helped beat the disease into remission.

And for a decade as chief executive of Intel, Grove has pretty much done the same.

Amid slowing demand for PCs, Grove has gone all out to develop new technology that will fuel more demand for Intel’s silicon microprocessors, which are the brains in more than 85 percent of the world’s personal computers. Intel is building devices that create new uses for semiconductors, such as networking hardware that links computers throughout a company.

Intel under Grove also has earned a reputation as the high-tech industry’s most aggressive litigator.

Last May, Intel hinted it might quit selling computer chips to Digital Equipment Corp. and sued to force the return of microprocessor blueprints crucial to making new Digital computers. The moves were a stern counterattack to a Digital lawsuit accusing its supplier of copying Digital technology. Intel, in its latest aggressive move, reportedly is talking with Digital about paying it $1.5 billion to resolve the lawsuit and buy its Alpha mainframe computer technology, which would expand Intel into more powerful business machines.

While Gates gets more press because of his vast wealth and Microsoft’s software products, Grove is far from reticent.

In a Fortune magazine cover story last year, Grove disclosed his cancer diagnosis to the world. He described how he began his research from a laptop computer while vacationing, and finally underwent a 28-day high-dose radiation treatment that he chose from among a confusing array of options. Grove’s remission gave hope to millions of other victims.

That same year, Grove likewise declared his business credo in his book, “Only the Paranoid Survive.” Fear, he wrote, helped spur Intel’s toughest and wisest business decision - exiting memory chips in the 1980s amid a worldwide production glut that threatened the company’s vitality.

Now, when Grove looks over his shoulder, the Federal Trade Commission is looking back. With both Intel and Microsoft now objects of federal scrutiny, Grove seems to have achieved a dubious parity of sorts with Gates. But in person, Grove is quite different.

In an hour-long restaurant interview, Grove had little patience for the prophesies favored by Gates. Gates tends to rock excitedly in his seat while talking of how the global Internet will transform society into a true democracy empowering people of all walks.

But Grove seems calm even as he describes the Internet as “the mother of all strategic inflection points” - his term for what happens when a huge change caused by outside forces sweeps over a company.

“I have a very hard time with the Epcot vision of the future,” says Grove, who retains a faint accent from Hungary despite emigrating more than four decades ago.

Grove instead dwells on how he uses the World Wide Web today. He’s customized pages on Yahoo and Excite, two popular search engines, to automatically deliver high-tech news related to Intel. He is an avid reader of CNET, a high-tech online news service that Intel has a small stake in - typical of small businesses Intel tries to foster to drive demand for its chips.

Grove’s passion for details precedes Intel. He graduated first in his class at City College in New York with a degree in chemical engineering. He got a doctorate at the University of California-Berkeley in 1963 and went to work for Fairchild Semiconductor, then led by the two men who would start Intel in 1968. Joining Intel that year, Grove worked his way up to become chief executive in 1987 and add chairman to his title last winter.

Today, the idea is to whet consumers’ appetites for more and more powerful chips. One way is a new system from Intel that uses PCs with videocameras and phone lines to create a version of the long-awaited videophone.

But Grove goes beyond conventional means. Last spring, he disguised himself in a space-age jump suit at an Atlanta trade show, then came clean before thousands of attendees to give the keynote talk. The gold-metallic costume not only poked fun at the suited, helmeted drones who make chips, it showed how Intel’s new MMX Pentium chip jazzes up graphics on the computer screen.

Asked whether too much technology can clutter people’s lives, Grove mentions that he refuses to carry a beeper.

“Nobody shoves technology down your throat. It took quite a while before I had a car phone. We all make our own decisions on how to spend our time. I choose what I use,” he says.

But what about the future? Will doors open when we ask them? Cars talk back? Houses clean themselves?

He hesitates above his bowl of cereal. He seems caught in his own contradiction. Forced to live day-to-day, he must dream of a new, better world.

Grove finally lowers his spoon toward the squares that resemble, vaguely, the thumb-nail-size microprocessors he sells more of than anyone else.

“My view of the future is continuing the present,” he says simply.