In Silicon Valley, the sun is still shining.

In northern Santa Clara County, a six-story blue-glass façade building is home to Intel, the giant of the computer CPU industry, and not far from there, the building that squats lazily in the sun is Apple's headquarters.

Since the death of Robert Noyce, the father of Silicon Valley, in 1990, Intel has ended the era of Not's promises and replaced it with Gordon Moore and Andy Grove at the helm, with the former as chairman and the latter as president.

Intel President Andy Grove's office is located on the south-facing corner of the sixth floor, and the sunlight shines through the glass curtain wall on the south side, illuminating the office brightly and spaciously.

It's not so much an office, it's just a partition on an entire floor, only six square meters in size, and in this building, Intel from the CEO to the average employee has no separate office but only a standard partition, and Andy Grove is no exception.

In an hour, the company's weekly meeting of senior management will be held, and Andy Grove at the desk does not see the usual ease, but a little nervous.

There are three text folders in front of him, all of which are about Chongguang Semiconductor Company, including the structural design analysis of the Youying Overlord coprocessor chip, the patent listing and item-by-item detailed analysis of all the international patents owned by Chongguang Company, and the evaluation and analysis report of the multimedia instruction set used by the Youying Overlord coprocessor chip.

"How did they do it...... I thought no one in the market knew about our MMX instruction set development plans. Andy Grove asked Yu Youcheng, the company's chief technology officer, sitting in front of him.

Yu Youcheng's face was solemn, frowning and silent, he wanted to say that I don't know, but it's better not to say nonsense like this, Yu Youcheng doesn't like to talk nonsense.

Andy Grove continued: "There are no more than twenty people in the whole of Silicon Valley who know about the MMX program, and almost all of them are in the technology department, otherwise AMD and Cyrix would have followed suit and announced their development plans. ”

Yu Youcheng lowered his head: "Sixteen, there are a total of 16 people in the technical department who signed a confidentiality agreement, including me. ”

Andy Grove shook his head and said helplessly: "At present, that set of instructions is still in the development stage in the real room of Haifa, Israel, and I don't know what went wrong." Is Israel or us here. ”

Yu Youcheng said quietly: "I don't think there is a problem anywhere, because the development of such an instruction set is not an overnight effort, and it is impossible for any semiconductor design company in Silicon Valley to set up a project today and come up with a plan tomorrow."

And this heavy light semiconductor company. Their multimedia instruction set technology is very mature and has no zài logic loopholes at all. Under the microscope, the internal design of the chip is also perfect, and it can be seen that it has strong design skills. ”

Andy Grove frowned: "If our instruction set is developed, how long will it take to implement the chip design of the instruction set?"

"8 to 10 months. Yu Youcheng said.

Andy Grove mused: "From November '93. Our instruction set has been developed for nearly two years, and the original plan was to complete the design by March next year, which means that we spent 28 months developing the instruction set, and if we use another eight months to design the chip that applies the instruction set, it is a 36-month development cycle, do the Chinese have faster development efficiency than us?"

"Our development equipment is the most advanced in the world, and the scientists are also top-notch, with China's current development equipment conditions and microelectronics design level, I don't think their efficiency will be higher than the technical department I lead. Yu confidently refuted Andy Grove's conjecture.

"So they started the development of the multimedia instruction set before we did?" asked Andy Grove, puzzled.

"Yes. Only this explanation is reasonable!" Yu Youcheng said categorically: "The Chinese side may think that coprocessors are a good direction of development, so they started relevant research and development very early!"

Yu Youcheng continued: "Andy, you know that China's process technology is very bad, they have not been able to conquer the process below 1 micron, and they are far behind the United States in the manufacturing level of large-scale integrated circuits, if they want to catch up with the world's advanced level, they need to find their own way. And there are a lot of smart people in China, and these geniuses must think that if the CPU can't be made strong enough, then add another auxiliary CPU. ”

Andy Grove is quite acceptable to this explanation. He couldn't help but get excited, and his tone became a little high-pitched:

In other words, they want to add a coprocessor to the computer to reduce the computational pressure on the CPU!

The best way to do this is to separate the floating-point arithmetic function of the CPU. The use of a coprocessor to perform the calculations separately and the addition of a multimedia instruction set to optimize the operation makes the design of the coprocessor as simple as possible!"

Yu Youcheng sighed: "Andy, you are a genius. ”

Andy Grove breathed a sigh of relief, his whole body sank into the leather swivel chair, and his voice was a little sluggish: "It's a perfect and reasonable explanation...... Damn it. These Chinese geniuses do have a wonderful solution to compensate for their technical weaknesses, but their R&D project collides with our multi-function CPU development plan.

Yu, you know that the company has invested more than $20 million in R&D for the multi-energy Pentium program so far, but what is more important is time!

We wasted two years! And if we have to wait until the technology is developed in Israel, we will have to wait another seven months! If we have to wait for the chip design to be completed, we will have to wait at least another eight months!

Yu, I can't wait another 15 months!"

Yu Youcheng said in a low voice: "Maybe it's more than 15 months......"

Grove put his head in his hands and almost went crazy: "Oh my God, this is the worst news I've heard this year!"

"Do you know? According to the information provided by our inside line at Cyrix, they have obtained the technology license of Chongguang Semiconductor, and are packaging and integrating the design of the Youying Overlord chip into the ugly and stupid 6X86 processor they just launched!"

Yu Youcheng's mood was also very bad, and he frowned bitterly: "In the past few days, I have carefully studied this Youying Overlord chip with Larson and Rick in the R&D center, and found that these Chinese geniuses are completely designed for the CPU of the X86 instruction set architecture.

Cyrix couldn't have been easier to integrate with their design, as if we were to integrate an additional 486 processing unit into a Pentium processor. ”

"How long do you think it will take for Cyrix to come up with the product?"

"The design work also takes a month or two, but the tape-out speed after the design is completed will be very fast!" Yu Youcheng explained, "After all, this is a two-in-one chip. In the past, whether it was 6X86 or Youying Overlord, all the designs of the two chips were mature designs, so tape-out only needed one or two adjustments and optimizations, and then mass production could begin. ”

The more Grove listened, the more angry he became. Slammed the table and said, "This won't work! This will be 13 months behind Cyrix! 13 months behind our rivals to launch a product! And it is also the first multi-functional processor product we have developed! This is ridiculous!"

Yu Youcheng sighed and said: "No way, this is 1 plus 1 is greater than 2, although we are the first in the world to start developing multi-functional processors, but the emergence of Chongguang Company is really an unexpected event." ”

Grove's nostrils began to erupt with fire: "No! I don't allow such a thing to happen! We Intel are the world's No. 1 PC processor manufacturers! I can't allow myself to be overtaken by a second-rate company like Cyrix!"

"Just think about what Silicon Valley is going to say about us. I'm going to go crazy! These guys are waiting to see our jokes!

Intel has been surpassed by Cyrix in the development of multi-function processors!

A new overlord of home computer processors is born!

Cyrix defeats the strong with the weak, surpassing the processor overlord Intel!

No! No! No! I don't allow that to happen!

Whether it's Cyrix or AMD, these second-rate companies can survive to this day by climbing and imitating our Intel products and relying on our technology licensing, otherwise this garbage would have died long ago!

If IBM hadn't forced us to license the X86 instruction set architecture to these second-rate junk, they would have gone bankrupt and disappeared! These bastards! Waste! If it weren't for the fear of being sued by the antitrust, we wouldn't have given them a single authorization!

Yu Youcheng saw that Grove was furious, and hurriedly said, "Don't be too excited. Andy, don't get excited. ”

Grove's chest heaved and he roared, "How can I not be excited? Noyce, a damned ghost, now wants me to wipe his ass! I didn't agree to license the X86 instruction set architecture to these bastards in order to get the IBM PC processor contract." Now it's good, retribution is coming!"

Yu Youcheng comforted him as much as he could: "Many energy CPUs are not as popular as we thought, and Cyrix's production capacity is limited, so 13 months is not much of a lead." Once our multi-functional Pentium is launched, it will inevitably defeat them with our process advantages and sophisticated design. ”

Grove shook his head and said, "You don't have to comfort me, I know what 13 months means, in addition to continuing to push the chip manufacturing process smaller." Nothing can be done. There are 13 months, which is enough time for Cyrix to capture all the multi-processor market. ”

Yu Youcheng stood up, walked to Grove's desk, and opened a text folder: "You should take a look at this." ”

Grove read in disbelief: "You mean. The technical department predicts that after our Pentium 133 is paired with the Youying Overlord coprocessor, the overall performance of the computer will be on par with Cyrix's 100MHz 6X86 processor.

Yu Youcheng nodded and said: "Yes, as long as we purchase the Shadow Overlord in large quantities, install it on the same PCB board as the Pentium processor, and make a processor product similar to a game cartridge." Plugging in the SLOT1 interface that we're about to develop on the motherboard will achieve a similar integration effect, and our design process and production process are all ahead of Cyrix, which means that they are not ahead of us in performance, if not by much. ”

Grove's eyes rolled: "This report is built, we should probably add a larger L2 cache, I think that's a good idea!"

Yu Youcheng nodded: "Genius idea, so that in terms of overall performance, we may not be inferior to Cyrix, of course, we have to make concessions in terms of price." ”

Andy Grove nodded heavily: "I was originally going to build a meeting today, and the price of the Pentium processor was lowered across the board, and we wanted to use the price war to drive down Cyrix's profits and consume those potential consumers as much as possible before their new products came out." ”

Yu Youcheng nodded: "It's not early." ”

"Yes, let's go to a meeting!" Grove hugged the three Wen Jiàn clips in front of him and walked out of his office cubicle with Yu Youcheng.

The meeting took place in Chairman Gordon Moore's nine-square-meter office cubicle, with a small round table in the center and a few folding chairs scattered around it.

Several senior executives at the core of Intel's headquarters gathered here, and in this most ordinary way, they arranged the important decisions of the world's first-class enterprises every week.

After listening to Andy Grove and Yu Youcheng's reports, the elderly chairman Gordon Moore leaned against the wall and said with gray hair on his head: "Since you are so far behind, why don't you try to buy this Chinese company?"

Andy Grove admitted: "According to our intelligence, I heard that Cyrix also wanted to buy them, and the bid was even as high as $50 million, but the other party asked for too high a price, and in the end the two sides only reached a cooperation agreement." ”

The old man Gordon Moore waved his hand angrily: "Cyrix, this group of Texas hillbillies, can't wait to cut a penny into two pieces for use, where are they willing to spend money, 50 million dollars is not enough for Intel to build half a wafer factory! This Chinese company can develop such an excellent product, there must be a large number of talented scientific researchers, this is a priceless treasure!"

The old man took a sip of the coffee in his hand, thought about it, and said briefly: "Acquire them!

Andy Grove frowned when he heard this: "How much?"

Gordon Moore thought for a moment: "Within 200 million, it can't be more." ”

Andy Grove and Yu Youcheng glanced at each other, and when they saw that each other had an approving look in their eyes, they immediately nodded: "I will immediately notify the Chinese branch to contact them...... Those lucky bastards. ”-

(To be continued.) )

PS: Thanks to Jiang Kan, Kashiwagi Dayo, Sea Breeze 050810, hnjh189, confused little rascal, Dongxue * Boundless, Wang Xuanxuan for rewarding.