Reborn Entrepreneurial Giant.

Chapter 654 Smart Chip

As a consumer brand, Honor needs to deal with not only technology, but also more considerations. For example, the Honor Type-C interface is compatible with the official USB3.0.Showing that you are different from Apple is a more open brand.

This kind of openness is reflected in many aspects, such as sponsoring RISC-V, an open source instruction set architecture, and the first official user manual will be released this year; there is also the Rust language under the name of the Mozilla Foundation. made greater progress.

In inconspicuous places, Glory is accumulating its own strength, and now it has recruited Wu Enda from the United States. He is an important member of Google Brain.

"I thought it was Jumei, but I didn't expect it to be Glory." Wu Enda

"Because Glory is not short of money, we can pay for the future, and we need it." Qu Li, he is not the one who contacts Wu Enda, but he, the boss, will definitely come forward when this kind of key talent joins.

So Qu Li talked about machine translation, speech recognition/synthesis, Klun voice assistant, image recognition, and autonomous driving, which he is most concerned about.In fact, Qu Li was imagining the future, what kind of Glory company he wanted.

"The application scenarios of Honor are Honor Home voice speakers and driverless driving?" Andrew Ng said about his understanding.

"It's not unmanned driving, more precisely, it is advanced assisted driving. If unmanned driving is realized so soon, then it will be of no value for me to build a car brand." Qu Li has never been technical.

Apple's innovation ability is not as good as the current Honor, and it has long lagged behind Android smartphones for a long time. In the high-end phone market above $500, IPhone has remained at about 50% for a long time, and even reached 85% in China after the release of the new phone. Chrysanthemum Factory After being hit, 600% of the market above $70 is occupied by IPhone. What black technology is there at this time?

Honor is a very rich terminal manufacturer, and most supply chain companies will not reject them, just like Samsung Display selling the best LCD screen to IPhone.

Of course, there are exceptions. For example, Toyota is the major shareholder of Aisin Transmission. If Qiancheng Motors really affects Toyota, the supply of Aisin Transmission will definitely be affected. It is said that GAC Trumpchi was cheated later.During the product definition period, Quli had considered whether their products would impact Aisin affiliates, and if not, they would purchase AT gearboxes from companies such as Hyundai Mobis, ZF or Magna.

As the chairman of two multinational companies, Qu Li himself has rich experience, and he also has elites poached from the European and American auto industries, and excellent management from Internet technology companies. His way of doing things is different from the beginning.

Back to Honor, among the new product launches in the first quarter of this year, the $99 Honor Home has become the absolute focus, mainly because this product is sold too cheaply.Think about DJI drones priced at US$999, smartwatches with the lowest price at US$399, and gold-plated models co-branded with luxury goods at US$9999. The Honor Home voice speaker is definitely a conscientious product.

With the emergence of HonorHome, Sanjay Jia announced the smart home plan on behalf of Honor, and also sold network products such as whole-house networking routers and signal amplifiers.

It is precisely because of the emergence of Honor Home that Wall Street investors have finally determined that Honor and Apple are really different.Although smartphones, tablets, and laptops account for the largest share of their sales and have all entered the smart wearable market, Honor also has niche products such as drone balancing cars, future-oriented autonomous driving, and smart homes.

Apple is a technology company that combines software and hardware, while Honor is a technology company with outstanding innovation capabilities and focuses on hardware.However, the cost of innovation is high and the risk of failure is high, so it is not seen by capitalists like Buffett.

Scientists and capitalists see it differently. Wu Enda and the others see the glory of ambition. If they can really succeed, then whether it is smart homes or electric vehicles, they can bring more changes to the world, especially unmanned.

But they didn't expect that apart from smartphones and electric vehicles, drones are the fastest-growing. Whether it's consumer-grade drones or drones for special industry applications, Honor has the top level in the industry.

Although the whole house intelligence is not a pretense, it is definitely not the focus of Qu Li's work. He and Wu Enda's communication is smooth. Since Wu is willing to work in China, it explains a lot of problems.

Honor has successfully established its own deep learning research center, and the gap with Apple is getting bigger and bigger.

For example, in addition to self-developed chips based on the ARMV8 architecture and GPUs compatible with the RISC-V instruction set, Spreadtrum will also develop NPU (neural network processor, a chip dedicated to deep learning).

It's not over yet, how can Spreadtrum be without DSP and ISP chips.For example, the later very famous Qualcomm 8155 chip combined CPU, GPU, DSP, and ISP.

As for one of the three pillars of future computing: the DPU for data centers, it will be in charge of Juyun Technology.

It is also difficult to develop a GPU compatible with the RISC-V instruction set, and the others are nothing. You must know that Qualcomm released the NPU chip last year.Of course, the development of car-grade chips takes time. Now Honor Weizhi has released the first generation, and the second generation will probably be released in three years. By 2020, there should be smart cockpit chips that surpass Qualcomm 8155.

Apple's A-series chips are for PCs, while Honor Constellation chips are for self-driving cars.One is pursuing performance, the other is pursuing intelligence, and walking on an unwise path, Qu Li feels somewhat uneasy.

So what to do?All the fear comes from the lack of firepower, so Mama Su poached more chip design talents from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, maybe...

Qu Li is helping out at Glory Spreadtrum and Weizhi. These two companies have different development directions and focuses, but most of the technologies can be used in common. Therefore, the number of middle-level management cadres has been reduced, and they have been combined to work and communicate together. discuss.

It wasn't until Yang Shi approached him again that Qu Li remembered that he went to Beijin to brag, and that the IT leaders summit held in Pengcheng at this time was once again given to Lei Jun and Lu Qi to participate.In no hurry to record the program of "Let's Talk", Qu Li interviewed Yu Yonggang, a Chinese chip expert recommended by Su's mother. After working in Intel for many years, he encountered a career ceiling, but he was not reconciled to sinking, and met the glory of seeking talents. Spreadtrum.

Spreadtrum's poaching is done in the name of Glory. After being dug out, he will enter the independent subsidiary Spreadtrum. Yu Yonggang will become the CEO of Weizhi, responsible for the development of smart cockpit and automatic driving chips. The vice president of Spreadtrum became one of them.

For the Honor chip department, the direction has been set, the organizational structure has been set, and the personnel has been arranged. The rest is out of Qu Li's control. Sometimes people should admit their limitations: "I don't have much skills, it's just luck. !"