Video Game Empire

Let's not mention how the big brother Chen is so devastated. After Li Xuan found that his elder brother was much more mature than before, he felt at ease and handed over the follow-up to him.

The Dongfang Electronics Laboratory and Dongfang Semiconductor Laboratory of CUHK have officially started operation and began to accept project applications. Of course, in addition to accepting applications, the laboratory will also release a series of targeted scientific research projects according to the commission of Dongfang Electronics.

The first research project commissioned by Dongfang Electronics is about the design of the MOS6502 processor. Dongfang Electronics has just reached an agreement with MOS Technology Corporation of the United States. After paying a license fee, it has successfully obtained the deep authorization of all the patents of the 6502 processor. It can develop a CPU more suitable for its own on the basis of the MOS6502 CPU.

The entrusted project of Dongfang Electronics is to hope that the core based on the original 6502 CPU can be further optimized to make the new processor more suitable for game running. This project was attracted by Dr. Cai Kang, that is, when Li Xuan attended Professor Zhao's weekend salon for the first time, the black and thin man with a mid-section head, his design plan was instantly attracted by Li Xuan, becoming the first of the two laboratories. An open project.

The 6502 processor was the processor used in Dongfang Electronics' first-generation arcade board, but it wasn't a processor designed for gaming. The new solution designed by Dr. Cai Kang integrates a series of peripheral components suitable for game running on the basis of retaining the 6502CPU core, including an interrupt controller, a memory management unit, a timer, and an eight-bit parallel I/O port , and a programmable sound generator.

The new processor has 64KB of logical addressing space and 2MB of physical addressing space. Since the 6502 is an 8-bit processor, the width of the internal registers is also 8 bits, and the width of the address bus is larger. Therefore, in order to access the entire address space, Cai Kang specially designed a segmented addressing mode for the new processor, using a memory management unit to divide the memory into multiple 8KB segments.

As for directly integrating a programmable sound generator in the CPU, the subsequent design of the game motherboard can directly cancel the sound effect chip, which can further reduce the cost of hardware.

Cai Kang's design plan has many commendable points, and this is the reason why Li Xuan has an eye for it. Li Xuan also learned about the professional ability of Dr. Cai through this plan. Dongfang Electronics will naturally not miss such a talent. After a detailed understanding of Cai Kang's situation, the relevant departments of the company will make a detailed description of his needs. Digging program.

At this stage, Dongfang Electronics has almost zero scientific research capabilities. After the preliminary screening of the two laboratories, all applications submitted to Dongfang Electronics need to be checked by Li Xuan himself. He urgently needs to rapidly expand the company's scientific research team.

There is a shortage of electronic talents in Hong Kong. The existing outstanding talents are basically concentrated in the three colleges and universities of CUHK, Hong Kong University and Polytechnic. Dongfang Electronics can basically catch all of them through industry-university-research cooperation. Companies have begun to look beyond Hong Kong, focusing on four places: Taiwan, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Due to the small size of Hong Kong, the electronics industry has only risen rapidly in the past four or five years. Many Hong Kong students who were interested in the electronics industry in the early days could only go out to seek development. However, those who have grown up eating Cantonese food and speak Cantonese may not be able to adapt to Taiwan and Singapore, which speak Mandarin, and the United States and Britain who speak English.

If there are companies in Hong Kong who are willing to provide the same treatment and development conditions, I believe that there are Hong Kong engineers who are making a living abroad willing to return to their more familiar and friendly cities to work. These works are being carried out in an orderly manner by the personnel department and public relations department of Dongfang Electronics Company.

Recently, Li Xuan has devoted most of his energy to a RICS (reduced instruction set) development project team established in cooperation with Professor Zhao Weiming, director of the Oriental Semiconductor Laboratory. Before Professor Zhao Weiming returned to Hong Kong to teach in the early 1970s, he participated in the development of the RCA1802, which is known as the originator of RICS processors, in the RCA company in the United States. He is no stranger to the concept of RICS that has just been proposed in recent years.

RICS (reduced instruction set) is relative to CICS (complex instruction set). Since the birth of electronic computers, after decades of modification and development, its instruction set has become larger and larger, and in order to realize these instruction operations, the design of the CPU has become more and more complicated.

However, statistics show that most of the operations that occupy the CPU and other computer resources are the commonly used and simple instructions that account for a small proportion of the instruction set, while the remaining complex instructions, which account for the vast majority, are actually used in a very small probability. It also results in low utilization of the complex structure designed for it in the CPU.

Faced with this situation, computer experts began to study the necessary simplification of the instruction set, so that each instruction can be simplified and normalized, and the complex operation of the computer can be realized by executing a series of continuous, simple and densely coded instructions. , so as to replace the complex instructions that are used infrequently in the instruction set to simplify the design complexity of the processor.

In his previous life, Li Xuan was a designer of low-level programs for embedded systems. The most familiar instruction set architecture is ARM, which is one of the most popular RICS architectures in the 21st century.

The number of devices equipped with ARM chip architecture is 25 times that of Intel. 99% of smartphones and tablets in the world use the ARM architecture. About 4.3 billion people, or 60% of the world's population, touch an ARM-powered device every day.

However, the instruction set architecture developed by the British company Acorn was extremely embarrassed and difficult to survive in the first years. When Acorn first developed computers, it asked Intel for technical information about the 80286, but was rejected by the other party, so it decided to develop a brand-new low-cost processor.

ARM1 was released in 1985. The structure of ARM1 was very simple, with only 25,000 transistors. The next year, an improved version of ARM2 came out. ARM2 is a 32-bit processor that integrates 30,000 transistors and operates at 8MHz. But its computing power is better than the 80286, which integrates 130,000 transistors and has a maximum clock frequency of 20MHz.

But at that time, not many people noticed this great new chip that was destined to go down in history. All the industry insiders focused on the 80386 processor released on October 17, 1985. Although the performance of Acorn's ARM2 far exceeds the 16-bit 286, it is very shabby compared to the same 32-bit 386 processor.

By the time Acorn launched ARM3, Intel's 80486 had already been released, and the performance of the two was still not much comparable. Acorn, which was in deep financial crisis and technical bottleneck, did not usher in a real godsend opportunity until 1993. TI (Texas Instruments) was convincing Nokia, an unknown Finnish communications company, to join it in the nascent mobile communications market.

At that time, TI had achieved a leadership position in the DSP field, but it was not familiar with the CPU business. Among the few companies that could be manipulated, it finally chose Acorn.

With the support of TI, Acorn successfully developed the most important processor core ARM7 since its establishment in 1993. The power consumption of ARM7 is very low, suitable for hand-held applications, and the manufacturing cost is also very cheap, which will quickly expand the market.

ARM7 fully complies with Acorn's original design concept - "low-cost, low-power and high-performance" (low price, low power consumption, high performance). This concept also coincides with the needs of smartphones in the 21st century, but it was imposed on ARM by Intel from the beginning.

It is precisely in order to avoid the unshakable dominance of Intel's 80x86 in the CICS field, Acorn can only choose to use fewer chip resources and fewer developers, but can achieve a relatively high performance processor chip of RICS technology.