This time it worked out. Can’t give it a survivorship bias. I don’t personally mind CEOs being encouraging, but at least understand that they don’t really ever know.
Credit for going after a vision, but every CEO has a vision and acts like it will inevitably happen.
Everybody's known that Moore's law was on its way out, for speed increases at least, since the mid 2000s - the seminal article was by Herb Sutter [1]. So hardware needed to get more parallel. But multicore is a distinctly different paradigm to CUDA, which is closer to SIMD but on a completely different order of magnitude. So Intel was never going to get to where the puck was skating.
The statement: "Not at all. Intel should be afraid of us. We will be bigger than them." is still true.
How is it true? Gaming rigs. No matter what processor people chose, people overwhelmingly choose Nvidia graphics cards.
If Intel was inside 50% of the market's rigs, Nvidia is in 70+% of those same rigs.
The statement wasn't puffery. The statement was made with naked, and overwhelming, confidence.
Given all the times that HN readers have derided grandiose executive pronouncements preceding flops, more people should recognize the above for what it is: not profundity but just puffery that happened to pan out. Not that skill and effort weren't involved in making it pan out but that any of a zillion things could have gone wrong to make that statement false and part of any manager's job is to project confidence and instill motivation despite knowing that.