During a presentation of his work on non-volatile memory for the NCR Microelectronics at an IEEE workshop, he was approached by Intel Co. and in 1979 joined Intel Co. as engineer, where he worked with the non-volatile memory team and was one of the co-inventor of Intel's first flash memory (ETOX). He later moved to the micro-processor division where he honed his skills for leading the Pentium project by working on two earlier generations of micro-processors-Intel's 386 and 486—in various capacities. In the 1980s, PCs had become mainstream tools for productivity enhancement at the workplace. By the time he started the Pentium project, many established and new players, including AIM consortium (led by Apple, IBM and Motorola) and ACE(Advanced Computing Environment) consortium formed in 1991 and led by Compaq, Microsoft, DEC, and MIPS Technologies, and a consortium by Sun MicroSystems (which comprised Sun, Fujitsu, Philips, Tatung and Amdahl) using superior RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) had all begun aggressively working on their big idea for PC industry and these projects seriously threatened Intel's dominance in segment. Dham believes that Intel's ability to 'focus and execute' while maintaining full compatibility of application with its previous generation micro-processors was the key reason for its success over dozens of these big competitors. In a Business Week cover story on Intel's new processors, Dham was quoted as General Manager of the 586 processor group(586 was internal name for project until it was named 'Pentium' at launch).