Vinod K Dham

"Father of the Pentium"

India.

Vinod Dham is known as the father of the Pentium processor.

Vinod was born in Pune in 1950. He completed his initial education in pune.For his bachelor’s degree, Vinod went to the Delhi College of Engineering. In 1971, he graduated from the college with a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. After graduation, he worked briefly in Delhi for Continental Devices – a semiconductor company. In 1975, he went to the US. There, he joined the University of Cincinnati to pursue a Masters in Electrical Engineering (Solid State). While he was making a presentation at the IEEE conference in Monterrey, California on re-programmable memory, he received an offer from the Intel to work with them.

In January 1990, Intel has made Vinod the in-charge of developing the 586 or Pentium processor. When the Pentium processor was ready, the market was not ready to accept it. The Pentium processor handled the task of providing graphics, audio and video as well as games on a home computer with aplomb. Soon, it became a big hit and the hardware manufacturers switched over to the Pentium processor. Dham was also the co-inventor of Intel's Flash memory technology. After 16 years at Intel, Vinod joined Nexgen Inc., a start up. In 1996 Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) acquired Nexgen. He quit AMD to join a start up – Silicon Spice Inc.

This time - the electrical engineer who in 1999 was named as one of the top 100 most influential Asian Americans of the decade makes a concession.