Vladimir Pentkovski

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Vladimir Mstislavovich Pentkovski (March 18, 1946 – December 24, 2012) was a Soviet‑American computer scientist who helped build Russia’s Elbrus supercomputers and created the El-76 high‑level programming language. He later moved to the United States and worked at Intel, where he led the team that developed the architecture for the Pentium III processor. A popular legend says the Pentium name came from him.

Born in Moscow, he came from a family of mathematicians and studied at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, where he earned his PhD and Doctor of Science degree. From 1970 to 1992 he worked at the Lebedev Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering. There he helped design the Elbrus-1 and Elbrus-2 supercomputers and led the El-76 language project. He also directed the development of the 32‑bit El-90 processor and started work on the El-91C, a project that was later canceled amid Russia’s political and economic changes.

In 1993 Pentkovski joined Intel as a Senior Principal Engineer and worked on several generations of x86 processors, from single‑core to multi‑core and many‑core designs. In the 2000s he led a Russian development team focused on the Vector Instruction Pointer (VIP) architecture. In 2010, under his leadership, Intel and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology won a grant of 150 million rubles to create a joint research lab, iSCALARE, aimed at high‑performance, problem‑oriented computing for fields such as bioinformatics, drug design, and pharmaceuticals.

Pentkovski passed away in 2012 in Folsom, California. He was survived by his two children: his son Mstislav Pentkovsky, an opera stage director at the Mariinsky Theatre, and his daughter Maria Pentkovski.