> Intel at its core is a marketing company

That's an absurd hyperbole.

I don’t agree with his point, but I can see it. For years CPU performance has largely been irrelevant, but they convinced the market to over pay on underperforming hardware.

Intel inside is great marketing and creating different brands of processors like i7 vs i3 independent of form factor pulls the focus away from absolute performance. Getting software manufacturers to customize for your chip again gets out of playing the actual head to head game.

It's really not hyperbole I can confirm after being one of the main contacts at a cloud service provider. Marketing can push engineering and allocate budgets. Everything is driven by "Plan Of Record" agreed with marketing. If you need something done you push marketing to add or change the POR.

> Intel at its core is a marketing company

It would be interesting to hear your other adages if this is anything to go by.

Project Crush and Intel inside are simply brilliant. It’s extremely rare for a component manufacturer to capture mindshare from the OEM.

Given they’ve led the charge technologically in CPUs for decades this is extremely high praise. I think people are taking this as suggesting Intel does not innovate technologically which is not the case.

The video provides evidence of the tech being nice but not required. They openly admit their CPU was “a dog” and all the software people hated it. Yet their strategy of going around them to management worked perfectly.

People forget how awful segmented 16-bit was. And other CPUs like the 68000 and Alpha were faster at various points in time.