Siheyuan starts from the stationmaster

Chapter 377 Server

Bai Zirui can rely on shady tricks to blackmail IBM and Intel, but in the workstation field, another rapidly rising microcomputer market, TRM is unlikely to be very competitive in the short term.

If a personal computer is a microcomputer with ordinary performance, then a workstation is a more professional and high-performance microcomputer, and it also has a name called a server.

The early workstations all used Motorola's 32-bit mc68000 processor. TRM processors have no advantage over it. The reason why mc68000 failed to replace 8086 and become the mainstream cpu in the personal pc field is mainly because its price is too high .

In this regard, TRM has the advantage of simple RISC architecture design. The TRM that has just been prepared for tape-out integrates 3 transistors, while Motorola's mc68000 integrates 7 transistors.

Under the same manufacturing process, the volume of TRM chips will undoubtedly be much smaller, which means that a wafer can be divided into many more chips, and the manufacturing cost will naturally be cheaper.

However, the high-end workstation market is far less sensitive to price than personal computers. Customers first consider the performance of the computer.This is also the main reason why mc68000 was able to occupy the workstation market in the early 80s.

Since Bai Zirui cannot use the existing TRM architecture to seize the workstation computer market that is about to enter the rapid growth period, he must make other layouts. Finding a new processor architecture is undoubtedly the best solution to the problem.

The University of Berkeley and Stanford University in the beautiful country each have a research group studying the RIAC architecture, and the leaders are two technical masters of later generations, Professor Patterson and Professor Hennessy.

When Bai Zirui was in Pretty Country, he arranged for Pretty Country branch to communicate with the two universities. Professor Hennessy's MIPS research group was more interested in the business development plan proposed by Bai Zirui.

Considering that he is familiar with the MIPS architecture, Bai Zirui decided to cooperate with Professor Hennessy of Stanford University to jointly develop a commercial processor based on the MIPS architecture.

In fact, the architecture that Professor Patterson of the University of Berkeley is developing is also very good. The SPARC architecture of the later Sun Company (Sun) was developed on this basis.Of course, the MIPS architecture is more familiar to the Chinese people. Later generations of China's Godson adopted the relevant patent authorization of the MIPS architecture.

MIPS architecture (MIPS architecture, the acronym for Microprocessor without interlocked piped stages architecture, also a pun for Millions of Instructions Per Second), is a processor architecture that adopts a reduced instruction set (RISC), developed and authorized by MIPS Technology Corporation , are widely used in many electronic products, network equipment, personal entertainment devices and commercial devices.

It is a simple, optimized and highly scalable RISC architecture.Its basic features are: containing a large number of registers, instruction counts and characters, and visible pipeline delay time slots. These features enable the MIPS architecture to provide the highest performance per square millimeter and the lowest power consumption in today's SoC designs.

After reading the email from Professor Hennessy, Bai Zirui sent him an email back, giving his opinion on some of the questions he raised in the email.Bai Zirui relied on his new golden finger and his familiarity with the MIPS architecture, which saved the exploring Hennessy team from many detours.

Therefore, Professor Hennessy recognized Bai Zirui's strength more and more, and the email exchanges between the two became more frequent.Although Bai Zirui made the president of Stanford University look up to him by cheating, he was also somewhat proud of himself.

With the development of semiconductor technology, the performance of microcomputers is also changing with each passing day. In the next ten years, workstation computers will soon replace the current status of minicomputers.

Since ibm will soon make an open technology standard, the future personal computer market will become a completely transparent free competition market. As the competition intensifies, profit margins will continue to decline.

Therefore, in Bai Zirui's plan, Aikang's research and development focus in the field of personal computers will gradually shift to the development of mobile computers, that is, notebook computers.Because in this field, no company has completely opened up its own standards like IBM, and no consumer has ever heard of it in later generations who can assemble a laptop computer by themselves.

In contrast, the more expensive workstation computer market is much more profitable, and this is the area that Aikon Computer will focus on in the future.Dingtian Company has made plans in advance and cooperated with Stanford University to develop commercial processors based on MIPS architecture, aiming at the future workstation market.

Bai Zirui is different from those rich people in Xiangjiang. Those rich people in Xiangjiang buy luxury cars and yachts. They can spend millions of dollars just to vote for a special number plate. Bai Zirui doesn't care about these at all.

In order to allow Dingtian Company to access the network, he specially asked Xiangjiang Telephone Company to pull an optical fiber line, and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for this without even blinking his brows.

The connection of Dingtian Labs to Arpanet has caused a lot of controversy within the company.Because the current Arpanet is not very mature, Bai Zirui’s reason for making it easier for the company’s global R&D centers to communicate with each other has also been refuted, because faxes can completely replace immature e-mails, but he is still arbitrary. Decided to access Arpanet.

Heung Kong Telephone Company has not started laying optical fiber in Hong Kong yet. Dingtian Company was the first to eat crabs. It not only pulled up the optical fiber line between the headquarters of Dingtian Company and the laboratory, but also funded Hongkong University, Chinese University and The Institute of Technology is also connected to the Internet by optical fiber.

Moreover, there is no submarine cable in this era. If the nodes of Dingtian Laboratory want to connect to the Arpanet of the beautiful country, they must be transmitted through satellites, which is not a small fee.

Therefore, in order to complete the entire project, Bai Zirui invested 500 million US dollars in one go, which is equivalent to 2000 million Hong Kong dollars. Such a large price is enough to buy a villa in Taiping Mountain.Moreover, the annual maintenance fee for the entire network system will cost millions of Hong Kong dollars.It can only be said that he is playing high-tech, which makes those Hong Kong rich and powerful who buy luxury cars and luxury houses feel so embarrassed.

Bai Zirui controls the computer to log into an electronic bulletin board system, which has a more widely known name called bbs.The most popular Chinese bbs forum was in the 90s, but it actually appeared in Chicago in 1978, and was invented by two computer enthusiasts.They later introduced their invention in "Bit" magazine, and the electronic bulletin board system became popular in the beautiful country in the late 70s.

Since Bai Zirui networked Xiangjiang University, Chinese University, and Institute of Science and Technology together, he simply created a bbs forum that is similar to that of later generations, and every domestic university has it.

He didn't have time to do it himself, but in the name of Dingtian Laboratory, he solicited design proposals from students from the three schools.Finally, under the auspices of Dingtian Lab, it took more than two months to integrate multiple excellent solutions from students majoring in electronic computing in three universities, and a forum called Oriental Pearl was finally established. The server of the forum is Put it in the computer room of Dingtian Laboratory.

(End of this chapter)