Comment by mobilio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mobilio | Hacker News Reader

This is less known fact, but few years (15+) ago Intel hire Elbrus design team: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/56406-intel-hires-elbrus...

"On Monday, Intel representatives confirmed reports in Russian-language newspapers that the American chip giant had hired approximately 500 engineers and related staff from the Elbrus Moscow Center of Sparc Technology, a state-sponsored design house in Russia. Some of the engineers will be hired away from Unipro, a related company. The new hires include Boris Babayan, Alexander Kim and Ivan Bolozov, said to be the architects of the E2K processor, a failed “Itanium-killer”."

And same happens in past too: https://www.theregister.com/Print/1999/06/07/intel_uses_russ...

But i couldn't get information more about this team.

"Russian designer could have been inspiration for Pentium name " - it's actually a fake news, Pentkovsky joined Intel several years after start of Pentium R&D.

I've heard that Pentium was named Pentium really late into it's dev cycle once the trademark office told Intel that trademarking model numbers wasn't going to be kosher.

I thought Intel had a contest for naming the 486 successor.

And i thought pentium was basically 'penta'=5 ... 486 + 1 arch bump.

At most companies they choose the marketing name near final release not at the start of R&D.

Pentkovsky joined Intel when they were developing Pentium III.

8086 -> 286 -> 386 -> 486 -> (5)86

Where (5) is Pente https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%80%CE%AD%CE%BD%CF%84%CE%B...

Do you think this was just to try and make it harder for them to compete by stealing their workforce?

If it's not then it seems an excessive amount of engineers at one time even for Intel. The goal would seem to be to cull the whole team.

Well here is one video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUNJ_tkq2hk

It's on Russian, but shows how underpowered CPU (on paper!) can play with no lags resource hungry game.

So let's back on Intel's issues. Almost 20+ years ago Intel have a huge project that failed. Itanium based on VLIW architecture. Then Intel start pushing P4 architecture (Netburst) to the maximum. I think that they're hit 3GHz barrier and there isn't path beyond that.

And then PentiumM was born (from Israeli team) and soon CD, C2D.

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