Looking at Wang Lili's cheerful smile, Hu Yiting was also happy in his heart, thinking of the future of the company, he felt that he had to seize every minute, and he really shouldn't waste time.

"Sister Wang, let's just do it, in order to develop a high-speed bus system, I have to find DEC to buy a technology license. ”

Wang Lili didn't have a deep understanding of DEC, and said, "DEC?

Hu Yiting nodded and explained: "DEC is currently in a deep debt crisis, but some of his technologies are world-class.

DEC HAS NOW OPENED UP THE ALPHA COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE, ALLOWING OTHER COMPANIES TO GRANT A SERIES OF PATENTS, INCLUDING BUS TECHNOLOGY, FOR A ONE-TIME FEE, TO ENABLE THEM TO DEVELOP ON THE ARCHITECTURE.

As far as I know, several domestic companies, such as Inspur and the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, have also bought their architecture licenses, but DEC did not think of opening up the ecosystem to attract manufacturers until it was too late. ”

"ALPHA COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE AND COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE ARE THE SAME CONCEPT, RIGHT?

"Yes, ALPHA computer architecture and computer architecture are a concept.

Before the advent of IBM's personal computer (PC), DEC had long been a pioneer of the minicomputer, and it could be described as the overlord of the small workstation generation. ”

Hu Yiting continued to introduce: " When users face IBM's large-scale commercial mobility millions of dollars in price, only DEC can provide them with hundreds of thousands of dollars of economical commercial computer workstations, although the speed of this small computer is not as fast as the mainframe, but the architecture design is very rigorous, and DEC pioneered the WYSIWYG keyboard and screen operation mode, with a friendly man-machine dialogue to make up for the defects of speed, full of intimacy and experience for users, so that IBM and other companies are vying to follow suit, today our computer operation mode can be said to be completely born from DEC's small computer。 So they completely dominated the minicomputer market, and DEC at that time became almost synonymous with minicomputers.

But in the seventies, DEC made several major mistakes in corporate decision-making.

First of all, they always adhered to the position of minicomputers, gave up entering the personal computer market, which seemed to have meager profits, and regarded personal computers as so-called "emergency products," and even gave up the opportunity for foreign engineers to come to their door to seek cooperation in the development of such important commercial software as spreadsheets!

Secondly, when they wanted to catch up, they couldn't put it on the shelf, and adopted a closed ecosystem with all the accessories made by themselves, and the personal computers launched were not only extremely expensive, but also had scarce application software. Coupled with the open architecture of IBM's personal computers, it catalyzed monsters like Intel and Microsoft, which eventually fell to the point where they are today.

EVENTUALLY, WHEN DEC ENTERED THE NINETIES, THE LOSSES BEGAN TO GET BIGGER AND BIGGER, AND FROM '91 TO '94 IT WAS A HUGE LOSS OF MORE THAN $4 BILLION! LAST YEAR'S '94 FISCAL YEAR ALONE WAS A HUGE LOSS OF $2 BILLION! HAD TO START THROWING OFF ALL THE DIVISIONS THAT COULD BE DIVIDED, SUCH AS SELLING THE HARD DISK DIVISION TO GÜNTNER, THE DATABASE SOFTWARE R&D DEPARTMENT TO ORACLE, AND THE NETWORKING PRODUCTS DEPARTMENT TO CABLETRON. ”

After Hu Yiting finished speaking, he knew in his heart that the emaciated camel was bigger than the horse, and it was acquired by Compaq every year, and the total price was still as high as 9.6 billion US dollars, which shows what kind of behemoth it is!

After listening to Hu Yiting's eloquent talk, Wang Lili smacked her tongue and said: "Hu Yiting knows so much, I feel really ashamed, I know too little! Hu Yiting, if you want a suitable candidate in the future, just replace me! I am so incompetent to be this president, I know too little!"

Hu Yiting interrupted her without hesitation: "Sister Wang, don't say such things in the future." No one can be omniscient and omnipotent, and people must live to learn from all the time, which is the correct attitude towards life. Everyone has their own merits, and in my eyes there is no substitute for yours. ”

Wang Lili looked at Hu Yiting gratefully and nodded silently.

So the two came to DEC's booth and asked for the authorized development license and related patents on the A architecture, and DEC immediately sent a staff member to negotiate with the two, this person named Brad Salin, a person in charge of DEC's technical department, he took the two out of the exhibition hall and drove to DEC's temporary office at the Monte Carlo Hotel, where DEC rented several large suites for temporary office reception and negotiation.

Entering the suite, Hu Yiting couldn't help but sigh, even if the huge loss, the big company is still the style of the big company, DEC asked the hotel to move the bed and other unused furniture in the suite, the front hall was arranged into a sofa and coffee table conference room, the back bedroom is placed office desk and fax machine, copier, typewriter, computer and other office equipment.

After Hu Yiting and Wang Lili contacted each other in detail, they first won the development permission of the Alpha architecture, and the price was only 100,000 US dollars, but the other related technology patents were more complicated.

Brad Salin looked at the memo of technical information one by one on the list and found that there were no restricted technologies in it. After all, the patent authorization proposed by Hu Yiting is to avoid the trouble of patent infringement, not to teach you how to implement the technology by hand.

Moreover, the Western embargo in the IC industry is mainly to use hardware equipment to jam China's neck, and IC design technology cannot be achieved separately from hardware.

Moreover, with DEC's current predicament, few vendors are willing to take the initiative to get involved in the Alpha architecture, which is a platform that is in the wane, so Brad Salin readily approved these technology licenses, and then ordered the assistant in the back room to print the list and fax it to the head office to determine the price of the technology transfer.

Hu Yiting then began to look through the patents on the A processor, and selected a dozen patents that he felt were necessary, especially some related technologies and instruction set patents of the 4 processor, and handed them to Brad Salin for review.

Brad Salin couldn't help but be a little surprised when he saw that Hu Yiting was so fast to flip through the information and make choices that he seemed to know everything about DEC, of course he couldn't imagine how "old" these technologies were for Hu Yiting.

"I didn't expect companies from China to be so interested in DEC's processor technology," he checked the technology against the memo.

It's a pity that the mainstream of the market has been swallowed up by **86 architecture processors, otherwise you may be able to make a lot of money.

Can I ask, what are you going to develop with these processor technologies?"

"We intend to develop our own mini-processors. Hu Yiting said casually.

"Good idea, DEC may not be suitable for the United States, but it must be the leading technology in China. Like yours, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has also bought a lot of our technology licenses, as well as several companies that produce servers.

Although I don't think you have the ability to implement our DEC state-of-the-art technology on your own processors, there are many foundries right now, and I wish you success in tape-out, if you can really design products in the future. Brad Salin also said casually. In fact, in his opinion, Chinese want to produce a processor of this level DEC21164, at least another ten years.

Hu Yiting was silent, he knew that the Alpha processor is the weakest architecture of the current memory model, because the reduced instruction set designed by DEC is too simple, although it is very convenient to drive the hardware, and the user can write the hardware driver by himself, which can make the hardware performance have a lot of room to play, but this is very unfavorable for the development of software on the platform, resulting in an extremely complex process of developing software, and it is difficult to program (the difficulty of ordinary coders hitting the wall with their heads), which makes the architecture extremely difficult to promote, so it is inevitable to die in the end.

But the so-called broken ship still has three catties of iron, and later China designed and applied to the Shenwei processor on the Shenwei-Taihu Light supercomputer, which has the Alpha architecture, but it is only similar to the Alpha architecture, the microstructure is completely different from the redesign, and the instruction set is greatly improved and expanded several times compared with the original, greatly increasing and expanding many new instructions to meet the needs of the application.

This improvement of Shenwei is a great blessing for program developers, and it also helps Shenwei-Taihu Light supercomputer to win the throne of the world's supercomputer speed champion! After the results were announced, the world was shocked, because this supercomputer used Shenwei's Chinese core! It also made the United States cry out in surprise, "The wolf is coming!"

And because the Alpha21164 processor is a processor designed for high-end servers that came out in 92, the technical span is very large, and the arrogant DEC does not disdain the 32-bit instruction design adopted by toothpaste factories and other processor manufacturers, but completely adopts the 64-bit reduced instruction set design alone, and as soon as the product comes out, it proudly claims that the platform life is 25 years old!

Judging from the improvement and birth of Shenwei processors from generation to generation, this is still a bit conservative, it may be that DEC himself did not expect that the progress of computer instruction set technology could bring such a big improvement to a processor, and the continuous improvement of microstructure also made the chip have a reborn performance.

In order to be compatible with 32-bit platforms, DEC has also designed an interesting software simulator FX!32, which enables the Alpha21164 processor to run almost all programs on indos.

Once Chongguang wins the technical authorization of the Alpha architecture and the 21164 processor, it will be like the later Shenwei processor, with the autonomy of independent expansion instructions and development routes, and can have a larger technical space in the product development of X86 processors in the future。

In any case, DEC used to be a company with amazing technology, and it is the result of poor decision-making. Some people say that enterprise management is decision-making in the final analysis, and this is true.

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