By all accounts, Pat Gelsinger is affable, technically sharp, hard-working, and decent. Those who have worked for him praise him as a singularly good manager. In January 2021, when Gelsinger was abruptly named the CEO of Intel, this is more or less all I knew of him — and I found myself urgently needing to learn much more. To understand my urgency, it’s worth rewinding the clock back to late 2019 and the earliest days of Oxide. We knew what we wanted to build, but we had some big (consequential!) decisions to make — first among them our choice of host CPU. Based on what we had seen in AMD Naples and Rome, we felt that AMD was clearly outpacing Intel, but this was a big bet and we wanted to be rigorous about it. Even though we felt Xeon was unlikely to be our direction, we scheduled a meeting with Intel in Santa Clara (pre-COVID!) to understand their roadmap.