[varjag]

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.

[Kafkish]

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

[varjag]

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?

[Kafkish]

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.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_III [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun

[varjag]

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.