Gelsinger Reloaded
07/11/2025 (Haha, 7/11 lol)

My name is Patrick Paul Gelsinger, but I normally go by either Pat or Father Patrick depending on the occasion. I live on 6969 Butter Churn Lane, Intercourse, Pennsylvania. From an early age, my existence has been defined by two key pillars: silicon and Christ. This is a day in my life.

I wake up to the crow of Yoder, my pet rooster, and the closest thing to an alarm clock that won't send me to hell. After which I consume my morning butter and get ready for the day. It's a big day today, we're reaching the end of the Cathedral Project, and today we will finally be raising the fab. If we fail to raise the fab, we will not be able to tape out, so we must all do our part.

Once I have finished my butter, I drink some milk and head out. It's a big day today and I want to show up in style, so I saddle up on Elmer with a black saddle instead of a brown one. However, during this time I am struck with a revelation: the combination of a black saddle and no beard may prove too tempting toward the unmarried maidens. Such a lack of modesty would prove unfitting for the leader of a company listed on the PENDAQ (Pennsylvania Dutch Auction Quotient). In the name of humility and my devotion to God, I unfasten the black saddle so that a brown one may take its place.

We begin raising the fab as soon as I arrive. The cleanroom is the hardest part to raise. Its modesty requirements demand our finest pure white linens during the erection process. Once the cleanroom has been erected, we bring in the lithography equipment. We must do this very carefully. The DUV (Divine Ultra-Violet) machinery is extremely complex, and the extra trade sanctifications in place mean that if any part is compromised, it is highly unlikely that we will receive replacements. In fact, the only reason we were able to get DUV equipment this early to begin with is because of our shared ancestry with the ASML board.

After the cleanroom, the UPW plant is next. The UPW exists to support continued wafer baptization throughout the fabrication process. One of Genesis Semiconductor's key process innovations, and a key advantage over competing English fabs such as those by TSMC, has been the construction of a chapel directly on top of the UPW reservoir, allowing batch-sanctification of the entire water supply at once, and ensuring that all water used in the process is not only ultra-pure, but also holy.

When the UPW erection has concluded, and the wafers sanctified, the Raising is declared finished. To celebrate, we lock arms and hop in a circle. Jebeddiah brought wine, and it is good. When the celebration has finished, we resume our duties, Project Ishmael has been underway for months, and it is now time to tape out.

Project Ishmael is the first in our new line of GPUs (Genesis Processing Units), a new SIMD-friendly architecture that extends the honest principles that defined our PlowArch lineup and brings them into the hyperscaler playing field. You may be wondering how we could support massively parallel operations without violating PlowArch's Fifth Commandment, but surprisingly the answer is deceptively simple. Much like how a farmer tends to his crops row by row, or a shepherd tends to his flock sheep by sheep, so too does Project Ishmael's singular core fetch the thousands upon thousands of identical instructions from memory and execute them dutifully, one by one. This revolutionary new computing paradigm has been referred to internally as earnest scheduling but hasn't yet been made public for fear of IP theft.

Despite the promising new architecture, Project Ishmael has endured many ruts in the path of its wagon, most notably during the Ordnung validation stage. Ordnung validation is required before the wafers can be churned, so any failure at this stage has the potential to be catastrophic. To solve the issue, we called upon Young Melvin, whose small hands, keen eyes, and unwavering devotion to The Lord allowed us to debug at the seventy-first-quarter-inch level. It's hymn-star employees like him that make Genesis Semiconductor what it is today, and we could not be more grateful.

The tape-out lasts the rest of the day. Most foundries take longer, but we pride ourselves on our fast churnaround time. To reward Young Melvin for his efforts, we let him break bread during the post-tape-out celebration, after which we once again lock arms and hop in a circle. It would be sinful to engage in two revelries like this daily, but this is a special occasion, and so The Lord permits it. The celebration ends, and I'm the last to leave. I head back to the hitch lot to find Elmer, but he's gone. My horse is gone. The only thing remaining at the post he was hitched to is a small note with several strange English characters I don't recognize: 祝你下次好运，白人小伙子

Must be old English, I can't read it.

My head starts to spin. I slowly stumble back towards the party. At this point I'm two wines deep, so my gait is wide and awkward, and my back is not straight. Through the anger and confusion, I hear the familiar hymn of “No Buttons Shall Be Worn”, and my spirit is lifted into the gentle embrace of the communion. I don't know where Elmer is, nor do I know what the English message says, but tonight is a night to be merry. We are hopping in a circle again, and it is good. As my consciousness flickers over the border from saturation into triode and through to cutoff, I am met with one final thought before the current disappears entirely: Elmer was wearing the black saddle...