Military Industry of Great Powers: Build the Strongest Flanker

Intel chief engineer Timothy Mack just breathed a sigh of relief. He told the newly appointed president Tommaso Biasi: "Without 193nm lithography machines, China's semiconductor manufacturing process will stagnate, but they still have a chance! "

This is also where Biasi is worried. The 246-nanometer light source lithography machine can also cope with the 350-nanometer process and even the 250-nanometer process. However, he maintained a confident smile and calmly said to Mike: "The R\u0026D project for the 250-nanometer process has been approved by the board of directors. It was passed, and the budget this time is US$500 million. I hope Intel will always have such good luck!”

Mike nodded. Intel was caught off guard by China's ARM processors. The 486 and 386 processors were all unsaleable, and millions of processors were returned from OEM manufacturers.

Of course... Intel only subsidized them a small amount of money for these returns, but even so, the blow caused by the ARM processor this time was huge, and Intel lost more than one billion US dollars.

If it weren't for the $300 million in targeted subsidies from industry alliances and Congress, as well as the financial support from major shareholder JPMorgan Chase, this wave would have almost taken Intel away.

Biasi is scared when he thinks about it, but Habib Bamogo, director of semiconductor process technology, doesn’t think so.

“The transistor density of Intel’s 350nm process is actually only 20% higher than SMIC!”

Under normal circumstances, the 350nm process should have twice the transistor integration and twice the frequency of the 500nm process, but in fact, Intel has not fully developed the potential of the 350nm process.

Bamogo hopes to continue to develop the 350-nanometer process, especially copper connection technology. He has seen that copper connection technology brings huge technical advantages to Zhongxun products.

But Intel couldn't wait, and Biasi was always anxious. It wasn't until commercial director Matthias Kerwin submitted the sales report that his frown slowly unfurled.

Kerwin said excitedly: "President Biasi, I am happy to tell you that in the past three months, our sales department has set a sales record. So far, the sales of 586 processors have exceeded two million pieces. This The data is still rising at the rate of 30,000 pieces per day, and our total sales have exceeded US$1.2 billion!"

However, Barmore did not feel happy. The 350nm process was launched too urgently and they had not yet controlled costs. Although the sales volume was large, Intel really did not make much money.

It was forced, and it was worth it.

At this time, if Intel does not put strong products into the market, the x86 platform will be declared dead.

Of course, they were too hasty...

CITIC ignored them. In November 1993, ARM released the latest desktop processor ARMv5 Pro, codenamed Duron, Chinese codename "Dulong", as well as the matching version of the PCI bus and public version chipset.

This news immediately touched the hearts of Intel management, and Intel even teamed up with IBM to purchase the technology license for ARMv5 Pro for research.

However, when he learned that the ARMv5 Pro processor still uses SMIC's 500nm process, Biasi took a long breath. But before he could relax, he received an announcement from Zhongxun Technology that the next generation voodoo graphics card would no longer The SGI bus process only supports the PCI bus. ARM announced the PCI technical standards to the world and established the PCI Bus Standards Association.

Biasi can feel the aggressiveness of Zhongxun Technology. The PCI bus standard is not a standard. They directly support the DDR memory standard.

The competition between the DDR memory standard submitted by VIA and the Rambus memory standard supported by Intel continues in the International Memory Standards Association.

As for the hard disk interface, Zhongxun proposed the SATA interface standard in order to use their NAND memory!

Biasi said excitedly: "They cannot be allowed to succeed. CITIC must do things in accordance with international rules. Without Intel's permission, they cannot use new technical standards. No one supports them!"

Kerwin is worried. He said: "We can still fight against other standards, but the graphics card interface standard is probably..."

Biasi looked at Kerwin with helplessness in his eyes. With the advent of voodoo graphics cards, there was no professional display chip manufacturer in the Western world that could compete with voodoo.

Biasi couldn't calm down. He yelled hysterically: "This is a monopoly. They use their monopoly position to achieve their dark purposes!"

"No!" Kerwin shook his head and said, "They are not a monopoly. ATI has also launched their display chips, but their market share is too low!"

ATI was still a small company, registered in Canada. When Biaxi learned that ATI had been acquired by Wison International and Intel had no way to intervene, he lowered his head helplessly...

…

Bay Island!

Wang Xuehong was in a good mood.

"Zhongxun's strength no longer allows for a low profile!"

His husband, Dr. Chen, looked calm and said: "There are currently two platforms for microcomputers in the world. One is Intel, the other is ARM, oh no, it is Sinocom. If you keep a low profile, how can you find your younger brother!"

Wang Xuehong nodded and said, "That's true, but..."

She is also a little worried. Although VIA now fully embraces ARM, their competitive advantages are limited. In other words, they do not master the core technology, which makes Wang Xuehong slightly uneasy.

Dr. Chen patted Wang Xuehong on the shoulder and said: "The ARM model requires VIA. Mr. Zhao's ambition is in standards. This will not hurt VIA!"

Patents and standards can never be avoided in the semiconductor industry.

Compared to the x86 Alliance, which has nowhere to spend money, ARM processors are like benevolent people. The patent licensing fee is very low, and the licensing fee for each processor is even less than one dollar...

At VIA's R\u0026D center, engineers are testing the public prototype provided by Zhongxun Technology.

Although it is still a 500nm process, the integrated transistor scale is 6 million transistors, and the frequency is not much different, with a maximum of 666MHZ.

But under the new platform, combined with two DDR333 16M memories to form a dual channel, it can directly fill up the bus bandwidth and fully utilize the performance of the processor.

"Floating point computing power has increased by 70%, and integer computing power has increased by 56%..."

Numbers cannot deceive people. Although the chip manufacturing process has not improved, the performance breakthrough in this iteration is still huge.

This toothpaste is so squeezable...

"To save time, use the public version!"

Wang Xuehong said yes. Of course, VIA now has certain capabilities to optimize the public version of the processor, but investing a lot of manpower and money to optimize the performance of three to five points is not worth the gain.

She told Dr. Chen: "SMIC will launch the 350nm process foundry within half a year at most. I want to focus on the optimization of the new process!"

Dr. Chen agreed very much and said, “It’s time to clear out the inventory during this period!”

There are at most three months left for Intel...