Mid-December.
Good news of a breakthrough came from the Home Computer Research Center in Su Hong City.
"President Chen, the first batch of prototypes has been produced. It's very smooth to use. The hardware and software systems are all successful!"
Hu Tengjiao, who was in charge of the project, said excitedly over the phone.
"The prototypes are out?"
Chen Jin was slightly shocked. The Home Computer project that had been in development for nearly two years had finally produced substantial results.
…
The next day.
In order to show his importance, Chen Jin brought a few executives to Su Hong City to inspect the research center.
He sent his greetings to the nearly 2,000 software and hardware developers in the research center.
The researchers were very excited to see their boss. They shook hands and took photos with him. Some of the female developers even asked for a hug.
"Thank you for your hard work, everyone."
Chen Jin kept waving his hands in greeting. The atmosphere was very warm.
…
In the product testing room.
Chen Jin saw two prototypes on a long table.
One of them was a desktop computer. It had a squarish CPU and a 19-inch monitor. It was no different from an ordinary home computer.
The other was a laptop. Since it was a test prototype, it also had a squarish appearance. Its thickness was comparable to a ThinkPad.
The project leader, Hu Tengjiao, did not turn on the two computers immediately. Instead, he asked someone to bring two chips.
Computer CPU chips!
One of them had a physical size of 4cm x 4cm. It was the size of half a palm. It was four times the size of a common Intel CPU. This was a desktop computer CPU.
The other one had a physical size of 2.5cm x 2.5cm. This was a laptop CPU.
"These two CPUs use Zhong Xin's 28-nanometer process technology. It's two to three generations behind Intel's most advanced 10-nanometer process technology. However, Intel's 10-nanometer production capacity is seriously insufficient. They are mainly producing 14-nanometer CPUs now."
The difficulty of manufacturing a computer CPU was much greater than that of a mobile phone. The surface area of a computer CPU was several times larger. The number of transistors was also several times larger. It could even reach tens of billions.
Under the same process technology, the larger the processing area, the lower the yield, and the higher the cost.
Therefore, Intel's 10-nanometer CPU finally achieved mass production in 20X0 after three to four years of delay.
Zhongxin's 28-nanometer CPU was, of course, worse. They could only make up for the difference in performance by increasing the surface area and the number of transistors.
Fortunately, after Chen Jin helped solve the problem of the photolithography lens, the super-resolution photolithography machine that was about to be launched by Shang Microelectronics could be used in the manufacture of the 10 nanometer computer CPU. Moreover, it could ensure that the conformity rate was sufficiently high … It could almost immediately catch up with Intel's most advanced CPU.
In addition, the size of the CPU here was several times larger.
In terms of performance, there was no need to worry at all.
More importantly, this CPU named "Azure Dragon First Generation" had a huge competitive advantage over the common X86 and MIPS architectures in terms of physical architecture.
The engineer in charge of the architecture, Liang Yongping, introduced:
"Mr. Chen, the current CPU architecture used by Intel and AMD is the X86 architecture, which is the absolute mainstream in the market."
"The X86 architecture uses a complex instruction set. This architecture has a mechanism of fast single instruction, a relatively small number of instructions, and sequential execution of instructions, which makes it easier to control."
"However, the X86 instruction set only has eight general registers. During the execution process of CISC, it mostly accesses the data in the memory. RISC (Reduced Instruction Set) systems often have a lot of registers, which slows down the speed of the entire system. In some microdecoding scenarios, the decoding speed will be very slow and complicated … Therefore, the utilization of various parts of the computer is not high, and the execution speed is slow."
"The MIPS architecture using the Reduced Instruction Set is similar to the ARM architecture. Both have a large number of core registers. After reducing the amount of data accesses to the memory, the power consumption is greatly reduced … Under the same performance, the MIPS architecture can provide the lowest energy consumption per square millimeter of chip design. Moreover, it is more flexible and open to use."
"The disadvantage of the MIPS architecture is that there are certain limitations in the support of memory and cache. There will be some problems when dealing with high-capacity memory … In this aspect, there are the advantages of the X86 architecture."
Liang Yongping held the chip in his hand and placed it in front of Chen Jin.
"However, the 'Weaver Architecture' used in our CPU simultaneously takes into account all the advantages of the X86 architecture and the MIPS architecture. It achieves high speed, high performance, fast memory data exchange, high CPU utilization, and at the same time, the power consumption performance is comparable to the MIPS architecture."
"Other architectures have more or less shortcomings, but with our Weaver Architecture, all of them have been solved!"
"The fundamental reason is that the distribution of transistors in this CPU is no longer the previous matrix arrangement and distribution. Instead, it uses a special 'array'. This' array 'can evolve into many changes, turning those transistors into computing units and memory units at other times … Intelligent changes to meet a variety of usage scenarios."
"It perfectly achieves both high performance and low power consumption."
Chen Jin nodded.
He brought the Weaver Architecture from the Base of Operations. Of course, he was very clear about the strength of this architecture and the various advantages it had.
In other words, this architecture was ahead of all the mainstream architectures in the market today.
It was an advanced product that surpassed the previous generation.
Not only did it achieve high performance and low power consumption, but it also had a killer function.
That was, it could not only be a pure CPU, but it could also be a pure GPU.
In other words, it could complete all the graphics rendering functions of the graphics card, and there was no need to buy a separate graphics card.
Generally, a slightly better CPU would cost about a thousand dollars. It was just that the performance of the integrated graphics card was very poor, and it could only play some games with low configurations.
If you added a better graphics card that specialized in processing graphics operations, and played a game of PUBG, the price would be at least a thousand dollars or more.
Or even two thousand dollars, three thousand dollars, five thousand dollars … It would take up half of the price of the entire mainframe.
The price of these two things added together was about 60% to 70% of a high-performance computer.
Now, with the "Green Dragon First Gen" CPU based on the Weaver Architecture, there was no need to buy a separate high-performance graphics card. The price was only 1500 dollars. Wouldn't you be tempted?
Of course, considering that being both a CPU and a GPU would greatly increase the power consumption, if you were to run a game with extremely high configuration requirements, a few hundred watts of operation power would produce a huge amount of heat that even water cooling would not be able to suppress. In the later stages, you would still have to research and develop a separate graphics card.
But for now, it was completely enough.
Because Hu Tengjiao held the CPU that was half the size of a palm and said, "President Chen, if this CPU can use the 10 nanometer technology, the performance after all the graphics processing is involved is roughly equivalent to the RTX2080 … This is enough for now, most users do not have to consider adding a graphics card."
Chen Jin nodded. The RTX2080 was already a super nuclear bomb, with a market price of more than ten thousand dollars. Would the number of people who could afford such a nuclear bomb exceed more than 1%?
Therefore, except for a very small number of nouveau riche users, a "Weaver Architecture" CPU would be enough for more than 99% of ordinary users for the time being.
Of course, no matter how good the hardware architecture was, it still had to be used in conjunction with the operating system and software to unleash its greatest power.
For example, although the X86 architecture had many shortcomings, it became the absolute mainstream of the market due to the formation of the Wintel alliance with Microsoft. The Windows system played a decisive role in the widespread use of the X86 architecture.
Therefore, his gaze returned to the two computers in front of him.
"Turn on the computers, let me see the performance of the operating system."
"Yes."
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