Reborn Tech Maniac

Chapter 686 Pushing Global Storage Prices Up

……

Obviously, Tang Huan was creating a topic to attract attention for his own supercomputer.

At the media briefing in a relaxed atmosphere, after Tang Huan introduced the plan smugly, the host deliberately gave the first opportunity to ask questions to a beautiful female reporter from CNN, who was quite caring and close. Suspicion of thick media.

However, the female reporter had a hard time helping Tang Huan, and asked right away: "I believe that the Fangyuan supercomputer with a computing power of 10 GFLOPS is very powerful, but is the investment advice analyzed by the machine credible?"

"I understand what you mean." Tang Huan smiled slightly. "It is undeniable that the protagonist of this plan is the mathematical model of financial analysis. Even if the computing power of Fangyuan supercomputer reaches 1000GFLOPS, it is only a supporting role in auxiliary calculation. We will Use the most advanced and comprehensive analysis methods possible to make the calculation results more credible."

"Then, Tang, would you believe me?" the female reporter asked.

"Of course I do." Tang Huan said without hesitation, "You know, this is science."

"If that's the case, then, will you invest based on the results of this analysis? How much money will you use?" The female reporter's play of "molesting" the richest man caused snickers from all the media in the audience.

Amidst the noise, Tang Huan replied with a little embarrassment: "You are right. If the analysis results are only on paper and not put into action, then it will be completely reduced to a commercial advertisement. I personally Willing to invest a sum of money to verify the results of this plan. As for the amount of funds..."

Speaking of this, Tang Huan raised a finger and shook it vaguely.

Seeing that the female reporter was trying to make things difficult again, the host quickly said, "The next opportunity to ask a question...give it to a professional media friend in the IT field."

The question of the second reporter is indeed a lot more serious, "The Taiji-II of the Fangyuan supercomputer reached 5.2GFLOPS the year before last. The latest Fangyuan supercomputer has to break through 10GFLOPS in terms of computing performance. It is a double improvement. Great. Excuse me, what is the key to supporting this leap?"

"A supercomputer is a comprehensive system. If there is a shortcoming in any link, it will lower the overall performance." Tang Huan explained eloquently as a computer expert.

"Of course, it still follows the general laws of computer science, and the key component at the top of the list is the CPU."

"This new system uses the third-generation version of the RISC microprocessor Holder, which is manufactured by the world's leading 1-micron process, and its maximum clock frequency is expected to exceed 100MHz. In addition, Holder-v3 is also an instruction set , cache, electrical and many other aspects have been optimized, and the performance has been significantly improved."

"It is no exaggeration to say that Holder-V3 is currently the most powerful microprocessor in the world, which in turn provides abundant computing power for the new generation of Fangyuan supercomputers."

"As for the more detailed specifications of Holder-V3, if you are interested, you can find out through the upcoming technical white paper."

"One thing I need to point out here is that, as the so-called Vientiane update, Holder-V3 not only has brand-new performance, but also its licensing system, and programming language compilers such as FORTRAN, C, C++, and PASCAL running on it, As well as the copyright mechanism of the operating system Vientiane, there will be some changes.”

"To take a specific example, we all know that the Holder product line is divided into four series, that is, according to different application fields, it is divided into Holder-L for embedded devices, Holder-M for workstations, and Holder for servers. -H, Holder-S for supercomputers."

"Now, we intend to establish a more open license system for Holder, and first try it in a new application field, that is, video game consoles."

"EA may be the first beneficiary. Its next-generation home video game console, the third-generation Xiaobawang game console, is a customized version of Holder. It will definitely bring a refreshing experience to players. Moreover, it will not let Everyone waited too long."

Reporters from all walks of life did not expect that Tang Huan would come out to blow the air this time and shake up so many heavyweight news.Immediately, someone rushed to ask: "Tang, do you mean that EA's new generation of home video game consoles has entered the countdown to release? The performance of Holder-V3 is so powerful. What kind of specification will it be?"

"For further detailed information about the third-generation Xiaobawang game console, please forgive me for not commenting here for the time being." Tang Huan pretended to have accidentally slipped his words just now, "I can only say that after the personal computer entered the 32-bit era, its performance has become more and more powerful. It is so powerful that it has a very pleasing game effect. As a hardware platform dedicated to running video games, the CPU of the second-generation Xiaobawang game console is a 68000-bit customized microprocessor of Motorola MC16 series, which even supports true color It’s all troublesome, and it’s time to make a change.”

……

What is an industry leader?That's just a fart, many people will come to smell it to see if it smells like garlic or onion. It's best to use this to analyze what Shiquan Dabu soup the owner has recently used.

After the media briefing, what the public talked about the most was that Tang Huan was embarrassed by being "molested" by a beautiful reporter.Every day in the United States, various celebrities respond to embarrassing situations with American-style self-mockery, but everyone obviously prefers to see how the richest man performs.

Now there are gaming companies that specialize in opening markets to bet on what Tang Huan's extended finger means. $1, $10, $100 million, or more?
In the street interviews conducted by CNN, more than two-thirds of the people believed that the richest man could not be too stingy in order to demonstrate the power of the Fangyuan supercomputer, and that finger should represent 100 million US dollars mean.

As a senior Tang Huanhei, the New York Post, unwilling to be lonely, gloated: "We think that finger represents 1 million US dollars."

Ordinary people are looking for fun from the richest man in a variety of ways, while professional observers have analyzed a large number of important IT industry trends from Tang Huan's speech at the media briefing.

First of all, Holder-v3, which has begun to emerge, has made RISC more and more brilliant, and it has the potential to indicate the future development direction of microprocessors.

It is even reported that even CISC manufacturers such as Motorola and Intel have secretly formulated RISC research and development plans as an option for the product line.

Venture capital is even more enthusiastic, favoring startups related to RISC.

According to market research, in addition to RISC microprocessors such as Holder, MIPS, SPARC, and PA-RISC that have been successfully launched, there are also dozens of large and small companies including IBM, DEC, Motorola, Intel, and Apollo Computer. The company is developing its own RISC microprocessor.

It is entirely foreseeable that in the next few years, a life-and-death battle will break out in the field of microprocessors. The outcome will not only determine which RISC microprocessors will survive, but may also affect the direction of CISC microprocessors.

In addition to the RISC war, the three generations of Xiaobawang game consoles in EA's legend finally revealed the tip of the iceberg in Tang Huan's careless "gaffe".

Although Tang Huan only mentioned it in a few words, the experts have already confirmed the three generations of Xiaobawang game consoles from the key points of customized version Holder-v3, true color, and not letting players wait too long. It will be a 32-bit host that supports true color, and it is expected to be presented to the public as soon as this year.

In EA's game release preview, the mysterious "32" appears in the names of the new versions of "Flight Simulator", "NBAlive", "FIFA", "Monopoly" and other works, which seems to confirm this point.

If all this is true, then the fully recovered North American video game market is very likely to usher in a new game console war.After all, Nintendo, Sega, NEC and other manufacturers who are currently at a disadvantage cannot give up the favorable opportunity of changes in market rules, so as to drag EA from the throne of hegemony.Maybe, there will be new companies joining this battle group.

It will take some time for these analysis results to be verified to be correct or not.But there is one analysis that has shown immediate impact.

One of the characteristics of the third-generation Xiaobawang game console that is about to come out is that it supports TrueColor—true color, like the fourth-generation Fangyuan personal computer.

The specific meaning of this concept is: the three channels that describe the pixel, such as RGB-red, green and blue, will each be represented by one byte; if the alpha channel representing the degree of transparency is enabled, there will be a fourth byte.

按照电子游戏通常支持的、从256×224到640×480的分辨率，一屏图像所需字节数最少为24×256×224÷8÷1024=168KB。

In this case, it is very likely that the main memory of the third-generation Xiaobawang game console will reach 2MB, and the video memory will reach 1MB. In addition, audio memory, input cache, operating system firmware, etc. are added. Less than a personal computer.

In other words, once the third-generation Xiaobawang game console is put into commercial mass production, it will consume a large amount of memory chips.

If this situation was put a year ago, it would not be obvious.But now is the time when the personal computer market is in full swing, and there is also a huge demand for memory chips.

In particular, the imbalance between supply and demand in the U.S. market has led to a sharp rise in global DRAM prices.If the third generation of Xiaobawang game consoles come to join in the fun again, it can only be described as adding fuel to the fire.

When this interpretation of Tang Huan's speech was made public, the market reacted exactly like this, and the global DRAM price rose by 5.00%.

Don't doubt that the U.S. semiconductor industry is so cowardly that it doesn't even have the dominance over prices.

At this stage, among the top ten semiconductor manufacturers in the world, Japan occupies five places, and No.1 is NEC.

However, major domestic American manufacturers such as Motorola, Texas Instruments, National Semiconductor, Intel, and AMD have long since dared not hang their main business on the DRAM tree after being impacted by the dumping of products from their Japanese counterparts.

As for manufacturers such as Micron that specialize in the production of DRAM, their current status is not enough, and their influence is naturally very limited.

More importantly, at the threshold of 256KB DRAM chips, the US semiconductor industry has been completely surpassed by its Japanese counterparts, and it is still passively catching up until now.

In short, Japanese semiconductor manufacturers completely control the global supply of DRAM, and they can harvest as much as they want, and ordinary buyers can only stretch their necks to be slaughtered.

The price increase of DRAM brought most of the PC manufacturers to their knees immediately, and the industry was in a state of mourning.

This is the difficult stage of the PC hardware price war. Participants who have invested huge resources in the past are not willing to give up the achievements they have made, so they gritted their teeth and carried it, hoping that others would be the first to fail and collapse. Down.

Looking at the documents, John Chambers found that many of the competitors' products that his subordinates collected were out of stock, and he couldn't help grinning, thinking to himself: "The boss's move is too cruel, small companies, especially most Manufacturers of IBM-PC compatible machines almost have to die at this hurdle. Only big players like Fangyuan, IBM, and Compaq can continue to play the current game. The more clever thing is that this round of DRAM The sharp rise in prices, even if you say it is artificially promoted, will definitely not be accepted, it is really killing people invisible."

The CEO of Fangyuan Computer Company was using his strokes to erase the names of those manufacturers who had been sentenced to death. A supervisor came to report: "Hewlett-Packard wants to turn over a batch of DRAM chips from us."

"It can't be." John Chambers frowned suspiciously, "We don't have enough DRAM chips for Fangyuan PC's memory sticks. Also, let's get this news out."

After the other party took the order and left, John Chambers shook his head and muttered to himself: "This personal computer standard war is probably coming to an end soon. If it continues, I will be terrified."

(End of this chapter)