Following his ouster as CEO of Intel, Patrick Gelsinger's future plans have repeatedly been called into question. Recently, it has come to light that Pat is now leading a new bleeding-edge chip startup, Genesis Semiconductor, located deep in the heart of his home state of Pennsylvania. The startup's flagship product is a new processor which aims to remove the bloat endemic to both complex instruction sets like x86 as well as so-called reduced instruction set architectures alike; in doing so, Pat also hopes that the company will restore American semiconductor manufacturing to its former glory. In order to accomplish this task, Pat has set out to find help in the most unlikely of places: Pennsylvania's Amish community. We now sit down with Pat and his associates to see how this story is unfolding so far.

Interviewer: “So Pat, as someone who's been in the industry since the age of eighteen, how did it feel when a board comprised of, among other things, BlackRock's co-founder, Boeing's former CFO & EVP of operations, two professors, and a doctor told you it was time to leave?”

Pat: “I don't want to talk about it.”

Interviewer: “Okay no worries, you mentioned that you are enlisting the Amish now to help you run your new fab. How is that going for you?”

Pat: “Glad you asked, it's going great. The Amish are good, honest workers. They work hard and take pride in what they build. Many of them have been building things since they were children so you could say they're natural 10x engineers.”

Interviewer: “Love to hear it, earlier you mentioned that your flagship processor is championing a whole new architecture. That's an extremely bold decision and we'd really like to understand your reasoning behind it.”

Pat: “Of course. PlowArch isn't just a new architecture, it's a re-definition of how we think about computing. We're going back to first principles here, and I mean literally, stone and chisel. There is no multi-billion dollar fab or bloated 372-piece Instruction set. PlowArch is about thinking at the deepest, most fundamental level about what it truly means to compute.”

Interviewer: “This sounds very exciting indeed, would you care to share some more details about how this processor differs from the competition?”

It is at this point that Pat directs us to his chief processor architect by the name of Jebbediah, or Jeb for short. Jeb explains to us that at its core, the PlowArch design philosophy is rooted in rigorous adherence to ten key commandments. They are as follows:

1. Thou Shalt Honor Thy Clock Cycle: All instructions, also known as commands, must fully execute in exactly one clock cycle, no more, no less.

2. Thou Shalt Honor the Seventh Cycle and Keep It Holy: In light of 1, all operations are halted every seventh clock cycle in order for the processor to rest.

3. Thou Shalt not use Floating Point: Floating point numbers are un-whole, and thus, unholy. Only true numbers shall be used for computation in a god-fearing processor.

4. Thou Shalt Not Speculate: Speculative execution relies on luck, which is of Lucifer. As such, PlowArch does not use it. This has the added benefit of making the architecture far more resilient to various pagan hardware-level exploits.

5. Thou Shalt Not Parallelize: Parallel execution relies on multiple truths being present at one time and is thus dishonest.

6. Thou Shalt Not Disrupt Thy Neighbour's Cache: When the cache is full, its contents may not be overwritten for such an act should be greedy and thus sinful.

7. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbour's Memory: Only one thread of execution may access a piece of memory for the duration of that thread's life cycle. As such, kernel objects such as mutexes or semaphores are not permissible on this processor.

8. Thou Shalt Not Use Virtual Memory: Virtual memory is the epitome of dishonesty. Programs may only use the RAM that the processor possesses, no more, no less.

9. Thou Shalt Only Allocate at Compile Time: Dynamic allocation is inherently sinful as it indicates a lack of faith on behalf of the programmer. As such, PlowArch does not permit it, forcing the programmer to fully commit to their decisions.

10. Thou Shalt Not Abstract: With the exception of TempleOS and HolyC, no further level of abstraction is possible on the processor. This was an executive decision on behalf of Pat in order to help keep the programmer closer to God.

The result of these ten commandments is a revolutionary new architecture that implements a completely novel approach towards computation, an approach that Pat and the team refer to as “Siloed Execution”. While critics are quick to point out issues with this approach's performance, particularly with AI-related use cases, Pat and his team state that they are overlooking one key metric: Honesty.

“Model alignment is a major issue in today's world and you're really taking a gamble when you try to implement these sorts of things through software”, Gelsinger states. “A lot of the alignment issues we're dealing with today are the direct result of models running on fundamentally dishonest architectures. The thing about PlowArch that makes it so unique is that it is built from the ground up to be honest. This means that model honesty is enforced at the hardware level, setting a hard cap on what any piece of software can change during runtime.“

And the team isn't stopping there! They're already hard at work preparing to roll out a completely earnest model that takes full advantage of the siloed execution paradigm and will be fully integrated into the hardware of their upcoming processor release. The model, Yahowa, or ‘Hoe' for short, aims to be showcase both the divine power and alignment of the siloed execution paradigm. “

“Yahowa is exclusively trained on scripture and the model weightings are branded into memory”, says Jeremiah, head of ML acceleration and brother/cousin of Jebbediah, “as such, it cannot be changed.”

Perhaps the only thing more disruptively earnest than the processor itself is the way in which it is made. “The Amish have always been first and foremost about sustainability”, says Pat, “It's at the core of who they are as people, and as such, I can't think of a better workforce to man the fabs of the future.” The details behind this innovative and sustainable approach to manufacturing is fascinating.

“All of our materials come from the Earth” says Mike, head of manufacturing and brother/cousin/second cousin to both Jebeddiah and Jeremiah. “Once we've cut the blessed crystal, we get to work etching in each transistor by hand. Once a processor has been finished, we thank the lord for all that he has given us before we begin anew.”

When asked about how this objectively less performant approach to manufacturing will drive widespread industry adoption to an extent that actually produces tangible environmental benefit, Gelsinger refused to comment.

The hot new startup is also attracting talent from outside the Amish community. Recently, it has been disclosed that the ghost of Terry Davis has been brought on as an independent contractor, supervising the TempleOS port for the system as well as leading the design efforts behind a new HolyC compiler tailor made for optimized compilation down to PlowArch's Ten Commandments instruction set.

Whatever your thoughts on Genesis Semiconductor or the semiconductor industry at large, it sure is an exciting time to be in the game! Join us next time when we interview Foxconn employee #6-94-20 to find out how he's using work to fuel his passion for base jumping.