It might sound like Gelsinger’s got a case of sour grapes, but the man’s far more savvy than that.
When you read that headline, it probably sounds like former Intel CTO and CEO Gelsinger’s got a case of sour grapes. Of course, the man’s far more mature and experienced than that. His comments came while speaking to the Acquired podcast as an invited guest at NVIDIA’s GTC 2025 conference, where the GPU vendor unveiled Blackwell Ultra GB300. Gelsinger, speaking in the pre-show podcast, said this to the hosts:Jensen and I had numerous conversations about ‘throughput computing’—today we refer to it as ‘accelerated computing’—versus scalar computing. You know: branch prediction, and short latency pipelines versus, “hey, who cares how long the pipeline is? just maximize throughput and create the programmability.” And obviously at the time, the CPU was the king of the hill, and I applaud Jensen for his tenacity in just saying, “No, I am not trying to build one of those; I am trying to deliver against the workload starting in graphics” and, then, it became this broader view, and then he got lucky, right? with AI.
