Intel Pentium Processor Engineer Dies in a Road Crash, Mumbai India

Intel Pentium Design Engineer - Avtar Singh Saini

Tragedy on Navi Mumbai: Avtar Singh Saini, a former director at leading tech company Intel’s South Asia division who was best known for his leadership role in the design and development of the Pentium processor, died in a road crash on Palm Beach Road in the early hours of Wednesday after a speeding taxi rammed into his bicycle, police said.

The 68-year-old NRI was a passionate cyclist, and was due to go back to the US next month, they added.

His son and daughter, who live in the US, were informed about the incident, and are on their way to India. “His other relatives who are based out of Mumbai had reached the hospital to claim the body. He had lost his wife few years back to illness and he stayed alone in Chembur when he came to Mumbai,” a police officer from the NRI Coastal police station said.

Yash Thorat, another cyclist who happened to be on Palm Beach road when the accident occurred, gave some details of what happened. “I do not know him personally, but I happened to cross paths with him, and wished him ‘good morning’. A few seconds later, I saw a taxi dragging a cyclist ahead. I initially froze, but gathered my strength and went to check. I found him lying on road. He had some consciousness and few other cyclists, who were there with him, who took him to hospital. I later got to know that he did not survive,” Thorat said.

Another cyclist said that Saini gave his phone to other cyclists and asked them to call a friend to inform them about the incident. “He was bleeding and the helmet had cracked,” he said.

Saini, who was part of the CACG cycling group, always wore safety gear when he trekked or cycled, the other cyclists in his group said.

The taxi driver, who was apprehended by passersby at the accident scene and was handed over to the police and a case of negligence and rash driving has been registered against him.

In his 22 years at Intel, Saini co-led the development of the Pentium processor and was involved in the first phase of the development of the Itanium Processor, the 64-bit Intel microprocessors. He left Intel in January 2004 and was associated with a number of smaller, but equally forward-thinking technology companies like Montalvo Systems, where he was the director of India operations between 2005 and 2008.

Introduced in March 1993, Intel’s Pentium processor was the fifth generation in the company’s x86 line of processors. Soon after its release, the processor went on to take the still-burgeoning computing market by storm – emerging as the microprocessor of choice through the 1990s and well into the 2000s for personal computers (PCs), laptops, as well as large-scale data servers.

[courtesy: HT]