Pentkovski was a student when the decision to axe domestic development was made.
His achievement is overstated in Russia (mainly from the urban legend that his surname led to Pentium). He is a great engineer, but Intel never had a shortage of people of his caliber.
But he was still good enough to lead the Intel team that developed the Pentium III, or is that an overstatement?
From his Wikepedia page:
> At the beginning of 1990s, he immigrated to United States where he worked at Intel and led the team that developed the architecture for the Pentium III processor
He was good enough, what's your point though? That Pentium 3 (started well over a decade after Soviet demise) wouldn't have happened if he hadn't worked at Intel?
You gotta at least get your facts right. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The Pentium III was released within that same decade (Feb. 1999) [1], not "well over a decade after Soviet demise".
In the same manner that the US space program would have advanced without input from Wernher von Braun [2], the development of Pentium III would have happened minus Pentkovski, though their presence pushed development faster and in directions that the projects would have taken longer to reach without them.
Pentkovski is no von Braun, just one of scores of processors engineers in his cohort. That there was pentium 2 before him and 4 after him is a pretty solid hint.
Google Soviet engineer Intel and look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Pentkovski