All in on INTC and Why You Shouldn't Count Them Out

$Intel (INTC.US)$ Full disclosure all the money in my and my wife's TFSA's (Tax Free Savings Account for the Canucks) is in INTC that's about $160K CAD . Here's a little history lesson for the younger crowd.

Back in the early 2000's Intel had a processor called the Pentium 4. It was such a piece of shit that the Pentium 3 it replaced was often faster than it. In fact, the Intel mantra of only the paranoid survive had them spending money to continue developing the Pentium 3 even though the Pentium 4 was the direction their marketing department wanted, i.e. MOAR MHZ. We'll get back to the pentium 3 later, but bottom line Pentium 4 was too hot, too slow and used too much power.

How did Intel go from top dog to underdog so quickly? AMD at the time had the Athlon CPU and later the Athlon XP which pretty handily beat the Pentium 4 at 80% of use cases (outside of video encode/decode). This is important because a certain rockstar engineer, Jim Keller, was responsible for a large chunk of the the Athlon and Athlon XP.

If we look at Jim Keller's resume, he worked for AMD and brought them to the forefront with Athlon. He worked for Apple and is responsible for setting the groundwork for the modern M1. He later worked for AMD again and is largely considered the engineer responsible for Ryzen, but he is too humble to admit it. He also worked for Tesla. Pretty much every single company he works for turns to gold. Who did Jim Keller work for before he funded and became the VP of his own AI startup? Intel.

CPU designs takes years and Alder lake is not completely Jim's baby, but he certainly played a part in it's development. Alder lake caught up and in several ways surpassed AMD in one CPU generation on an INFERIOR manufacturing node. That's freaking impressive. The full Jim Keller CPU is supposed to be Royal Cove which will be competing with Zen 5 possibly late next year or early 2024.

I'm not finished. Lisa Su is pretty worshipped around here, but let's look at Lisa's engineering resume. She was responsible for the Cell CPU in the PS3. A CPU so shit and so badly missed it's design goals that Sony had had to duct tape a Nvidia graphics card to it last minute. This extra cost to the already expensive PS3 and subsequent YLOD almost cost Sony their console division.

On other hand we have Pat Gelsinger that took that pentium 3 and came out with a little product called the core2duo. The core2duo later became the i7, i5 and i3 architecture when the added an on die memory controller. He also introduced the tick tock design mantra at intel which led them to over a decade of dominance.

I'm a retard like all of you so don't put all your money in intel like me, but sure as hell don't count them out. $Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.US)$