Reborn Tech Maniac

Chapter 555 Artificial Intelligence and Symantec

The shrewd Gates is best at stealing lessons by climbing up and down. He quickly let go of unnecessary entanglements and tentatively said: "I don't know how powerful the fourth-generation Fangyuan personal computer with 32-bit architecture will be. It would be nice to see the prototype."

"You'd better care about how Xenix passed the POSI certification. I'm just giving a rough strategy here. The actual implementation requires your cooperation with the specific responsible department." Tang Huan changed the topic in a tight tone.

Although the 32-bit architecture concept of the fourth-generation Fangyuan personal computer was released early for media hype, the detailed progress is a commercial secret.Including partners, no matter what the source is, they must keep silent.How could Tang Huan disclose it to Gates in vain?The other party couldn't afford this price at all, and it would be almost the same if AT&T existed.

It's a pity that AT&T has a lot of airs, and Tang Huan still needs a lot of bargaining chips. However, Western Electric Company under its command, compared with Bell Labs, which has continuously launched new commercial versions of UNIX, has not achieved much. Tang Huan, who was expecting it to become an important new force to promote Fangyuan technical standards, was very disappointed.

This may have something to do with the dizzying changes in the personal computer industry.You must know that almost every month there are manufacturers in the market that withdraw sadly, or even if they retain the brand, they have changed their lineage and become a member of the two standard camps of Fangyuan personal computer and IBM-PC.

The Fangyuan workstation and Fangyuan server, which have a direct inheritance relationship with Fangyuan PC in terms of technology system, seem to be updated faster than minicomputers, which makes it difficult for large enterprises with traditional business thinking.

Especially last year when the home video game console market in North America collapsed, personal computers played a role in fueling the flames. In the end, almost only the cheap computer manufacturer Commodore and the video game manufacturer EA remained. This really frightened the onlookers.

In short, with COMDEX as the symbol, Tang Huan launched a batch of new products every six months, which invisibly made the competition in the microcomputer market extremely fierce. , even AT&T was affected by this "negative factor".

In Tang Huan's license structure, although there is a concept of "priority" for partners, it will never spread too much into the "future" roadmap, that is, unlike when companies such as Intel and AMD share technology and cooperate, There is no clear demarcation line drawn on the possible future achievements of X86 family processors.

In other words, the bargaining chips that AT&T got from Tang Huan have the timeliness of being unused and expired. No matter how slow it is in the development of microcomputers, the cards in its hand will be completely outdated. up.

Tang Huan didn't bother to pay too much attention to AT&T. After all, AT&T was still making a lot of money in the communication business, and the pace of entering the computer industry was careless. The research and development progress of Dai Fangyuan personal computer.

Industry observers are generally cautious about Tang Huan's plan to actively promote the 32-bit architecture of personal computers. The reason is that the concept of 32-bit is still taken for granted as a "high-end" application, which should be considered by mainframes and minicomputers. .

I have to say that this is a matter of vision.Although they are all computers with 32-bit architecture, they can use technical means to increase data processing capabilities such as code parallelism and cache acceleration to differentiate products into high-end and low-end, commercial and personal use, and other market positioning.

Of course, bringing a 32-bit architecture to the PC was a lot of work and difficulty.

The realization of the plug and play of hardware devices, upgraded 32-bit bus, enhanced video processing performance, DMA, etc., is a test of the manager’s ability to control complex projects. A slight mistake will be like Jobs’ development of MAC , procrastinating for several years, not only wasting resources, but also brought a heavy burden to the company, and maybe it will be depressed because of it.

Fortunately, there is a help that can significantly speed up the progress of the project, that is, many technologies have been realized on Fangyuan workstations and Fangyuan servers. Learning from high-end to low-end is far better than groping from scratch.

The slightly troublesome place is the supply of CPU. Fangyuan PC has always insisted on walking on two legs, that is, the product line is divided into two series--Motorola MC68000 models for mid-to-high end and Intel X86 models for mid-to-low end .

But now, Intel can't come up with a 32-bit CPU.In order to fight against Motorola's MC68000, it put its hope on the InteliAPX432 microprocessor project with a more advanced architecture, and brought in Tang Huan and Siemens to help out.

However, judging from the information collected so far, the structure of InteliAPX432 is too complicated, and the operating efficiency of the microprocessor manufactured by the existing semiconductor technology level is obviously behind that of Intel80286, let alone compete with Motorola's MC68000.

Perhaps, the only solution is to modify the existing ideas of InteliAPX432 and design and manufacture it in a RISC manner.But this still can't help Intel launch 32-bit CPUs as soon as possible.

The old rival Motorola has launched the MC32 with a complete 68020-bit architecture, and it has been successfully taped out.

Such research and development progress, of course, benefited from Tang Huan's promotion.Similar to IBM's ability to modify the internal structure of Intel80286, the MC68000 authorization he obtained from Motorola is also very loose, and there is a lot of room for adjustment of the processor.

MC68020是MC68000微处理器家族当中，第一款真正意义上的32位CPU。此前的产品仅是内部暂存器、运算单元等结构是32位，外部的数据总线、地址总线并不是32位。

After all, the 24MB memory space supported by the previous 16-bit address bus is enough even for high-end Fangyuan workstations and Fangyuan servers.

However, with the continuous reduction of memory prices, computers in the high-end field have greatly increased the possibility of configuring more than 16MB of memory capacity.

The fourth-generation Fangyuan personal computer prototype placed in front of Tang Huan, the CPU inside is such an MC68020.

On the surface, it seems that this computer can already run smoothly, but in fact, there are still some details that need to be improved in terms of video, audio, network and other functions.

Tang Huan looked at the documents in his hand, and observed the actual operation effect of the prototype one by one according to each marked milestone.

"That's right." Tang Huan nodded with satisfaction. "According to this progress, it is absolutely possible to expand the scope of testing to the circle of professional computer media before and after COMDEX this fall, and let them continue to help us build momentum."

John Chambers reminded with concern: "I am a little worried that if the concept of the 32-bit fourth-generation Fangyuan PC is too successful, it may affect the existing sales of the third-generation Fangyuan PC and previous models. Performance."

"Are you afraid that the failure of the Osborne effect will repeat itself here?" Tang Huan laughed.

Due to fierce competition from companies such as KayproComputer in the portable personal computer market, they only occupy the first-mover advantage, while Osborne1, which has been surpassed in terms of quality and technology, is increasingly in danger.

So Adam Osborne tried to regain the favor of consumers by releasing a series of new product plans, but unexpectedly, not only did the goal not be achieved, but the existing users canceled their orders one after another and entered a wait-and-see state.

In the end, the poorly managed Osborne Computer Company had to enter bankruptcy protection, and survived the difficulties by switching to the Fangyuan personal computer camp and manufacturing low-end portable second-generation Fangyuan personal computers.

This commercial failure has become an analysis case of many business schools in the United States, and it is even called the "Osborne effect".

However, Tang Huan obviously didn't think he would repeat the same mistakes, he had his own ideas.

"Why did users stay on the sidelines after Adam Osborne released a new product plan? After the novelty of Osborne1, the first portable personal computer, consumers gradually lost interest in the technical strength of Osborne Computer Company." Confidence, and our Fangyuan Computer Company will not have this problem of distrust.”

"More importantly, every large-scale product upgrade process of Fangyuan PC from the first generation to the second generation, and from the second generation to the third generation, has made the continuity perfect. Most of the users' existing software can be directly used. Or with only a few modifications, you can easily transition to a new hardware platform and enjoy more powerful new features."

"Users' existing investments are respected and preserved, so they naturally don't worry too much about buying existing products, which will be a loss. After all, when a new product is first launched, even if it is in every possible way, the price is certain. It is better to buy the current mainstream products to be more affordable if you are high above the ground and can’t delay your work.”

Speaking of this, Tang Huan smiled, "Of course, the impact you are worried about is also reasonable, but this is also an excellent test for our marketing team."

At this time, the function demonstration process of the application software reaches the link of the database EBase, and a natural language artificial intelligence response program called Q&A starts to run.

Seeing Symantec in the list of cooperative companies in the copyright notice section——Symantec, Tang Huan couldn't help being slightly taken aback.

"This program has a good prospect. It will allow our Fangyuan computers to be placed in libraries, banks, airports, hotels and other places to provide people with simple consulting services." John Chambers nodded in affirmation.

"In the field of natural language artificial intelligence response, the founder of Symantec, Gary Hendricks, has made a lot of achievements. The start-up capital of this company was funded by the National Science Foundation. It's just that the management is not good. It’s not because of the cooperation we gave, it’s going to close down. By the way, the location of Symantec is the same as Fangyuan Computer, and it’s also Mountain View.” Charles Simeone introduced.

National Science Foundation - the National Science Foundation or NSF, is an independent agency of the US government that supports basic research and education in science and engineering in addition to the medical field.The projects funded by it account for 20% of the basic research projects in American universities funded by the US federal government.Especially in the fields of mathematics, computer science, economics, and social sciences, NSF is the main federal sponsor.

Gary Hendrix's artificial intelligence project can be seen and funded by NSF. It should have real materials. How come there is no money to make in the end?Tang Huan couldn't help asking curiously.

"Symantec developed artificial intelligence on the platform of the DEC minicomputer PDP-11, but after the results were obtained, it was discovered that compared with personal computers, the PDP-11 no longer has any commendable advantages. Gary Hendricks had no money to migrate to the PC platform because he hadn’t had a stable profit business for a long time.”

After Charles Simeone finished his answer, he began to sigh again, "The industry changes brought about by personal computers are really great. I remember how popular the PDP-11 was when I was working at PARC. I didn't expect it to be released so soon. was eliminated."

PDP-11 was indeed all the rage in the 1970s. Bell Labs' operating system Unix first ran on PDP-7 and was written in assembly language.When PDP-11 appeared, Dennis Rich and Ken Thompson began to transplant Unix to the new platform of PDP-11, and then the C language that supports data types was born.

This shows how popular the PDP-11 is.It's just that the rapid rise of personal computers has directly lifted this type of minicomputer from the altar.

The specific implementation of the hardware architecture of minicomputers and personal computers is very different. Take the processors used as an example. The general-purpose CPUs of Motorola and Intel are popular on the personal computer platform, while the entire processor of the PDP-11 contains four. A large integrated circuit chip manufactured by Western Digital, which was originally famous for its hard drives in time and space.

In terms of memory utilization, the shortcomings of the PDP-16 with 11-bit architecture are even more obvious. All applications are limited to a 16-bit virtual address space, so only 64KB of memory can be used, which is directly replaced by the 640KB of IBM-PC. The user program memory space is thrown out by a block, and it is even more incomparable with Fangyuan personal computer.

Symantec has now transplanted its natural language artificial intelligence response program to the Fangyuan Computer platform, especially using EBase as the backend database. It is definitely a blessing in disguise.

"This artificial intelligence looks really good." Tang Huan also affirmed, "Invite the main people of Symantec to come over and let me see it."

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(End of this chapter)