return to bolang life

Chapter 256 The most high-end technology often only needs the simplest method
Monday, October 10th, the first working day in October.

Countless migrant workers dragged their 'tired' bodies into the company and suffered from post-holiday work syndrome overnight.

They all looked listless.

Wen Liang first sent Li Rang to the primary school attached to China Normal University, and then went to the school.

It was a little early, and there was no one in the classroom. If there was no Wanmi who was worried about comparing the schedule and the classroom, he would have suspected that he had gone wrong.

It's all here, Wen Liang didn't bother anymore, sat in the last seat in the last row as usual, took out his phone and scanned the range.

During the random trips during the National Day, Wen Liang and Su Jian often turned into black winds and two evil spirits to stir up wind and rain on the range.

The eyes inserted before did not mention a word.

Suffocated a bunch of people.

The most superficial user interface optimization of the main star system is still a little bit, there is no major breakthrough, and it is not very disgusting to Apple.

There was no logic in what they were doing.

Make trouble everywhere, sow discord.

Poland, which hadn't joined before, also came to the range, and finally formed the five permanent members of the range, and the chickens were flying like dogs.

In fact, the development of range is not very smooth, and the development of Ring America seems to be a little less aggressive in the eyes of overseas users.

Moreover, Wen Liang has a rhythmic plan for the development of range. At this stage, the core is to focus on major overseas manufacturers. Once a major manufacturer ends up making short videos, he will immediately start hand-to-hand combat to increase the popularity.

As a result, range has not been launched so far. After many adjustments, the recommendation algorithm that can best catch users.

Wen Liang had just teased Ah San, who was out of combat power, on the range for a little day, and seven or eight students crowded into the classroom.

The first person looked up and saw Wen Liang, a little surprised: "Hey, Wen Liang came so early today."

"Well, why don't you go in, yo, Wen Liang came early enough today."

"..."

It's lively with a chatter.

After a while, Chen Jiaxin, Tang Pu, Zhao Mingjie, and the eldest sister Liang Yameng and others also came.

The topic quickly turned to the 'star system'.

Although the movement was quiet during the holidays, the targeted optimization of user experience in one version a day did surprise users.

"Wen Liang, there have been speculations on the Internet that the 'star system' is related to Bolang, is it true? I asked someone to refresh the star system. Besides frequent updates, the ease of use has indeed improved."

"Bolang doesn't usually work overtime, and it's even more impossible to work overtime during the National Day holiday. I don't think so. Many big Vs on the Internet have also denied their relationship with Bolang because of this."

"Last semester, there were rumors in the school that the laboratory that Bolang cooperated with the school was researching and solving some technical problems. Could it be the star system?"

"No, it's just an Android UI. How can it be treated with such a high standard? Besides, it's clearly an integrated circuit design."

"But there is no place for Bolang to do IC."

"Then who knows for sure."

One of the students raised their opinions, and the other objected. Wen Liang smiled and interjected: "The Star System is related to Bolang, so it's hard to tell you more specific details."

The crowd was surprised and delighted.

"So it really does matter!"

"No wonder it's getting better and better. I know that only Bolang in China has the ability to adjust the most brilliant UI."

"Then Bolang can make mobile phones. If it's just a UI that is not put on the mobile phone, it's a bit rootless."

"It will definitely be, that's why Bolang and the school jointly conduct IC design research!"

"But didn't Qin Zheng go abroad to study with Academician Cao?"

Everyone didn't want any answer from Wen Liang, and Wen Liang didn't say anything more.

…………

…………

In the afternoon, Wen Liang walked into the company.

The office atmosphere is as usual, and everyone is very busy.

After sitting at the desk, Wen Liang flipped through several documents on the desk.

Everything that was expected is in place.

The progress of the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that supports the star system is acceptable, the first beta version has been completed, and the official version can be released after all aspects of testing are completed.

The second stage of technical optimization of the star system has begun.

However, the graphic interface of "World" has been formed for a long time, and the plan is to form a system from point to surface, so the marketing efforts will be slightly delayed.

Li Ze submitted an additional draft.

He believes that the vigorous promotion of the system should be promoted simultaneously with the promotion of IDE, and endorsed in the name of Bolang.

It means that this needs a suitable timing, and this timing will come from some actions of Alibaba Cloud OS.

There is nothing wrong with this draft direction.

Nowadays, the promotion height of the star system has reached a bottleneck. If it wants to break through, it really needs a big movement to endorse it.

Shelving the promotion temporarily is also an option, and the original IDE promotion meeting will also be postponed.

After opening the last report document, Wen Liang sat up straight and shouted outside: "Miss Wan, tell Mr. Ze, Mr. Tang, Mr. Chen, Mr. Wu, Mr. Zheng, and Mr. Xiao to come immediately." my office."

Wan'an notified immediately.

Several people came to Wen Liang's office in minutes.

Seeing everyone, Wen Liang went straight to the point: "Have you reviewed this plan?"

"The process has been approved." Chen Jiaxin answered the question first, "Is there something wrong?"

Wen Liang frowned slightly, and asked directly: "Are you all sure that it is the SoC tape-out including the CPU on our company's own mobile phone, not other chip tape-outs on the mobile phone?"

Next to him, Li Zeqi said, "Isn't this already in Mr. Wen's plan? It was also your request before the festival."

Wen Liang was still a little puzzled: "Wu Gong, tell me how this trick changed?"

Wu Gong is Qin Zheng's deputy. Recently, he often works with the hardware development department of Bolang Lab's mobile phone business department in the company.

"Mr. Wen, the SoC chip to be taped out this time is not self-developed." Wu Gong could hear it clearly, and he knew it was a little misunderstanding caused by the description of this plan.

"In the past three months, a large part of the HGIC lab has been doing research on the ARM v8 CPU architecture and the mali GPU architecture, and has completed a lot of design work by the way. Putting it on it, experimental results were soon produced, and the company completed the integrated design and verification."

"You mentioned before the festival that the necessary chips should burn money, so we worked overtime during the holiday, conducted multiple rounds of verification, and finally approved and proposed a tape-out plan..."

Following Wu Gong's explanation, and Zheng Gong and Xiao Gong's additions from the side, Wen Liang understood the ins and outs.

Be regarded as an 'oolong'.

.........

In the era of 2012, the global mobile market was actually just beginning to emerge.

Even if the Apple mobile phone has reached the fifth generation.

It is still an era where there are many players and each other is divided.

The former mobile phone empires collapsed one after another, and new players sprung up like mushrooms. Except for Apple, the rest did not make much progress.

There are many players in each core field.

On the system side.

iOS dominates.

The unbelieving Nokia tossed multiple systems, and finally chose to embrace Microsoft's WP.

Samsung took over MeeGo, which was abandoned by Nokia, and then integrated Tizen with Intel using two major Linux alliances and Samsung's self-developed BADA. It has been unable to compete with iOS and Android, but it has not given up.

The BlackBerry mobile phone, which is very supported by the upper management of America, is showing the illusion of being in full swing in North America with the BlackBerry system.

Google led the formation of the Open Handset Alliance with hundreds of hardware, software, and communication manufacturers, established the Android-based Android Open Source Project (AOSP), and promoted Android globally.

Later, it was regarded as a standard by domestic players who like to advocate corner overtaking.

Among them, some manufacturers led by Lenovo have developed the so-called self-developed mobile system based on this, and have also obtained the support of the nuclear high-tech project.

Including Alibaba Cloud OS, which is also known as a self-developed system.

Boss Lei, who was considered by later generations of netizens to be of little structure, saw that developing his own mobile phone system was very troublesome. He got inspiration from Meizu Huang Zhang, and finally developed MIUI based on Android. Now it is a bit of a domestic UI that dominates the market.

The convenience that native Android can be used directly has made some other low-end domestic mobile phone manufacturers place their bets.

As a result, Google's Android has a 90% market share in China.

In terms of core processing chip or SoC.

Apple has expanded its own A-series chips based on the ARM instruction set architecture, which is also leading the way.

Among the flagship models, the Samsung S3 is based on the ARM architecture, and the Exynos (Orion) chip is designed and developed, and the HTC One X uses the Tegra3 of Nvidia.

Other models in the domestic market, the popularity of the Mi 2 has reached the flagship standard, using a Qualcomm chip designed and developed based on the ARM architecture.

In addition, there are Texas Instruments, MediaTek, and Juchang, which is polishing K3V2.

According to the design and development, there are now a dozen or so players in the world who can be ranked first.

but!

However, here comes the very interesting part. Taking the domestic market as an example, Google Android accounts for 90% of the market share, right? In fact, the only flagship mobile phone that can be sold is the Mi 2 that has not been officially launched yet.

Meizu has half of the MX, because there are too many revisions.

Even counting the whole year of 2012, the combined shipments of the two companies are probably in the tens of millions.

Therefore, except that Apple is relatively awesome because it has subverted the mobile phone industry, the rest are the masters of the big brother, don't laugh at the second brother.

In short, when all the information was consolidated and presented to Wen Liang, he found that he had a lot of biased judgments about the actual market in 2012.

Not to mention the system layer.

Once the Star system was launched, it directly aimed at flashing the Android series flagship models, covering more than 200 million machines, which is enough to show that the 90% market share of Google Android in China has already covered important markets.

However, if the processing chip first seeks to solve the problem that can be used, the research and development cost is within the acceptable range, and the research and development cycle is really short!
The status quo of ARM, which is famous in later generations, is not very awesome.

In the first three quarters of 2012, ARM's sales were only US$5 million. Note that it is sales!

At present, the market value of ARM fluctuates around US$120 billion, and its assets fluctuate around US$19 billion.

As early as July, because the IC design led by Qin Zheng was deadlocked, Wen Liang had approved and ordered the purchase of ARM's IP license.

License fee of $870 million and 1.5% royalty.

According to ARM's financial report, revenue comes from 33% of licensing fees, 50% of royalties and tools and technical support.

At this stage, licensing fees generally range from a million to tens of millions of dollars.

This price is basically top-notch.

At this stage, ARM's IP authorization for core processors is divided into three forms: architecture/instruction set-level authorization, core (IP core)-level authorization, and usage-level authorization.

Architecture-level authorization means that the ARM architecture can be substantially modified, and even the ARM instruction set can be expanded or reduced.

Apple is a typical example, extending its own swift architecture based on the Armv7 instruction set architecture.

Kernel-level authorization means that you can use cores such as Cortex-A53 as the basis and then add some of your own designs to finally form an SoC. Qualcomm and Juchang are typical examples.

This level of authorization can vary greatly.

For example, Qualcomm has its own GPU architecture, so it does not need a GPU kernel authorization, and even has the idea of ​​magically changing the CPU architecture.

However, Juchang does not have a GPU architecture and requires authorization in this regard. Of course, this authorization can be purchased from ARM or from other companies.

After all, SoC is a comprehensive layout.

The final use level authorization means that ARM's IP cannot be changed, and ARM's IP cannot be used to create its own packaging products based on this IP.

A simple analogy:

An article A can be modified and used when it is taken, which is an architecture-level authorization, B can only be referenced and used, which is a kernel-level authorization, and C can only be forwarded and cannot be changed, which is a usage-level authorization.

The consideration at that time was that it was suitable for Qin Zheng and the others to use as a practical reference for research, so what Bolang purchased was a full set of architecture and kernel-level authorization.

That is, the Armv11-A CPU architecture and mali GPU architecture launched in November last year.

包括v8-A57、v8-A53、v8-A35和mali-400这些IP核。

It is also the reason why the authorization fee will be so high in this year.

This part of the copyright purchase fee is counted as the cost of research reference materials in the basic research funds.

截止7月底的3.5亿基础研究经费中，IC实验室花掉了2.7亿，包括这870万美元合计5500万人民币的授权费。

It was related to Qin Zhenghui's refusal of the visiting scholar invited by Academician Cao before.

Because there is a huge gap between the ultra-high investment in basic research data, research environment, research equipment and other aspects of the chip and the constant overthrow and restart of the research and the stalemate.

Later, after the launch of the Star System, everyone became passionate, coupled with gentle persuasion, Qin Zhengcai 'awakened'.

It may be that the goal of investing a lot of R&D funds from the beginning is self-research from scratch, so Wen Liang subconsciously did not consider the option of designing and developing SoC based on ARM authorization.

And, Wen Liang misjudged the market in 2012 a bit. If it is based on ARM's deep authorization, the cost of trial and error is not high to design and develop a chip.

Take the full set of in-depth licenses currently purchased by Bolang at a large price as an example. Three months is not too fast.

100% guarantee the success of tape-out. As for whether it will work well, no one can guarantee it. Examples of crashes abound.

Now Huagong IC Laboratory and Bolang Laboratory have spent more than three months and spent a lot of research and development funds. The preliminary review results should be quite good.

After all, the main research content of Huagong IC Laboratory in the past three months is to try to quote these IP cores for arrangement and combination and small-scale tuning.

To describe it directly: the method of researching content is the simplest exhaustive method.

There is no shortage of research and development funds, but there is a lack of time, so the teams try separately, and arrange and combine them according to 1, 2, 3, and 4, which one is easier to use.

It must be explained that this SoC to be taped out belongs to Bolang's design, and there are very, very few things.

In short, if you just want to be able to use it, 32 million yuan can roughly get a SoC, and the process uses 28nm or [-]nm-in fact, it can be seen from the process that the investment will not be so high.

However, in Wen Liang's view, as of the third quarter, the basic research investment of the two laboratories has cost as much as 3 million, 4.6% of which has been used in the IC laboratory.

I think at least a few hundred million dollars will be burned.

Who would have thought that chip design, which is considered a very high-end technology, can be solved by a very elementary and violent exhaustive method, whether it has IP authorization or not.

It's no wonder that the original 1 million can be burned out, but the laboratory burned nearly 3.5 million, and it is still in the process of overthrowing and starting over.

That's why Wen Liang lost his composure when he came to the company today to see the SoC tape-out plan.

After sorting out the ins and outs, Wen Liang did not hesitate, and said directly: "If there is no problem with the technical approval, take it to TSMC. If the tapeout fails, continue until it succeeds."

"Compared with the current cost, if our first mobile phone can have a higher control over the hardware and software core, then it will not be far from business success."

After talking about the arrangements, Wen Liang didn't give everyone a chance to say more, so Wen Liang directly 'threw' everyone out of the office.

After closing the door, Wen Liang rubbed his hands, and muttered excitedly: "Haha, I turned out to be wrong about the era! It's over for you to step on the horse!"
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PS: Regarding the exhaustive method, it is also carried out in some higher-end projects, because even in the technological development of 2022, there are actually few innovations, and many key projects are solved violently, including materials, hardware, and software.

For example, recommendation algorithms are generally piled up violently with massive data.

(End of this chapter)