Vladimir Pentkovski

Vladimir Mstislavovich Pentkovski (Russian: Владимир Мстиславович Пентковский; March 18, 1946, Moscow, Soviet Union – December 24, 2012, Folsom, California, United States) was a Russian-American computer scientist, a graduate of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Ph. D., Doctor of Science, distinguished professor, winner of the highest former Soviet Union's USSR State Prize (1987), one of the leading architects of the Soviet Elbrus supercomputers and the high-level programming language El-76. 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. According to a popular legend, Pentium processors were named after Vladimir Pentkovski.
Biography.
Pentkovski was born in Moscow, USSR into the family of the mathematician, Mstislav Pentkovskii (1911-1968), Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, full professor (1955), full member of The National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Kazakhstan (1958), the author of the specific nomogram's application in the engineering.
After graduation from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (1970), completed his Ph.D. and Doctorate of Science. From 1970 to 1992 Pentkovski worked at the Lebedev Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering designing the supercomputers Elbrus-1 and Elbrus-2 and leading the development of the high-level programming language El-76.
Starting in 1986, he led the research and development of the 32-bit microprocessor El-90 which combined the concept of RISC and Elbrus-2 architecture. The logical design of El-90 processor was finished by 1987, with the prototype launched in 1990. At the same time Pentkovski started designing El-91C microprocessor based on El-90 design, but the project was closed due to the changes to Russian political and economic systems.
In February 1993 Pentkovski started his career at Intel and rose to the level of Senior Principal Engineer. He focused mainly on CPU architecture working on several generations of x86 from single-core to multi-core to many-core. Since the beginning of 2000s he was leading the Russian CPU development team on a new processor Vector Instruction Pointer (VIP) architecture.
In 2010, under Pentkovski's leadership, Intel and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) won the contest of university proposals to launch major world-class research initiatives with the participation of prominent international scientists, conducted by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation and received a grant of 150 million rubles. A team of Intel engineers, led by Pentkovski in collaboration with MIPT researchers, launched a lab targeting research and development of computer-intensive applications. Primarily, the lab iSCALARE was focused on problem-oriented, highly parallel hardware and software architectures for bioinformatics, drug design, and pharmaceuticals.
After Pentkovski's untimely death in 2012, he was survived by his two children: his son Mstislav Pentkovsky, who resides in Russia and works as an opera stage director at the Mariinsky Theatre, and his daughter Maria Pentkovski, who resides in California. His final resting place is in Folsom, CA.