The concept of the Diamond Alliance is said to have been pioneered by Andy Grove, president of Intel Corporation. Among the three founders of Intel, the first CEO, Robert Noyce, gradually withdrew from the day-to-day management of Intel as early as the late 70s, and began to engage in various adventures around the world, such as skiing, skydiving, and surfing.

Recently, due to the continuous aggressiveness of Japanese semiconductor companies, Noyce, who is still holding the position of vice chairman of Intel, has re-emerged. On behalf of the U.S. semiconductor industry, he is lobbiing in Washington to request the U.S. government to launch an anti-dumping investigation into Japanese semiconductor products.

Now in charge of Intel management are Gordon Moore and Andy Grove. In another time and space, after the crisis of the company's main memory business, the company quickly transformed into a processor manufacturing company with the wave of PC compatible machines.

But in this life, because of the appearance of Li Xuan's butterfly, Intel has lost the best opportunity for transformation. After the advent of the previous 80286 processor, it encountered the dilemma of no one caring, so that Intel was forced to abandon the follow-up development plan of the X86 series.

But Gordon Moore and Andy Grove are the most prominent figures in the U.S. semiconductor industry, and their eyes are definitely very sharp. Although for the entire semiconductor industry now, the size of the memory market is much higher than the processor market.

However, the U.S. semiconductor industry has been completely passive in the field of memory. In terms of technology, Japan already has Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, NEC, Hitachi, and Toshiba five companies that can sell 256K DRAM, while the United States has only Motorola completed relevant research and development.

In terms of production costs, American companies are both in chip yield. In terms of labor efficiency, it is far inferior to its Japanese counterparts. Even if the U.S. government eventually introduces corresponding industrial protection policies, U.S. semiconductor companies will barely be able to hold on to their home markets at best.

And after losing the overseas market. Everyone is shaving in the local market, and in the end, it is inevitable to kill each other. After many defeats, it is likely that only one or two companies will survive.

Compared with the fiercely competitive memory market, the market in the processor field is exploding rapidly with the popularity of personal computers, and Japanese semiconductor companies are going all out to capture the memory market, and have not entered the processor market on a large scale!

Although Intel had suffered a crushing defeat in its previous rivalry with Dongfang Electronics, in the eyes of Gordon Moore and Andy Grove, Dongfang Electronics was far less terrible than the Japanese company.

Because Intel's competition with its Japanese counterparts is simply an unfair game. Intel is actually competing with a consortium, or even a country. Although Dongfang Electronics now has an absolute lead in technology, its technical advantages are the least secure.

So Intel is still the same as another space-time. He chose to transform from a memory manufacturer to a processor manufacturer. But because it failed to take advantage of the PC wave, Intel's transformation path is obviously more difficult than another time and space.

Therefore, Intel must find allies, especially the need to win over downstream end product manufacturers. Otherwise, after Intel's new processor comes out, it is likely to encounter the dilemma of no one caring after the previous 80286 was launched.

The two allies, DEC and Apple, are obviously carefully selected by Intel. DEC is the second largest computer manufacturer in the United States after IBM. Although DEC's minicomputer products have been greatly impacted by the rapid advancement of personal computer computing power, the so-called emaciated camel is bigger than a horse.

What's more, the DEC camel is still far from dying. Its latest VAX8600 mini-form factor has once again helped DEC win back a large number of customers with excellent performance.

In the face of the warehouse reality that high-end personal computers continue to hit the minicomputer market, Mr. Olson, the founder and CEO of DEC, is obviously not a person who sits still. He was ready to launch DEC's own workstation computer. to fight back strongly against emerging challengers such as Aikang.

As for Apple, a star company that once matured the personal computer with its own hands, although it seems to have fallen into a low ebb of development after being stolen by Aikang, the new CEO John Scully took office. Decisively kicked out the founder Steve Jobs. His recent series of reforms seem to have rekindled the capital market's hopes for the long-established PC market.

DEC and Apple. Now there is an urgent need to launch a competitive PC product to prove their strength. And the most critical indicator that determines the performance of a computer. It's the computing power of the processor. Intel was able to solve this problem, so the three companies quickly came together.

Intel's new processor, called the i8610, is available in A and B models, respectively, for enterprise-class workstation computers and desktop PCs.

The i8610 uses the B-RISC architecture, which was bought out by Intel from the University of Berkeley. The first two people in the United States to carry out systematic research on RISC (reduced instruction set) were Professor Patterson of Berkeley University and Professor Hennessy of Stanford University.

Among them, Professor Patterson's b-risc project started a little earlier than Professor Hennessy's MIPS project. The b in "b-risc" stands for Berkeley. rise is Patterson's definition of the reduced instruction set, so the reduced instruction set was later collectively referred to as RISC.

In another space-time, the MIPS architecture is more widely used than b-rise, and Li Xuan is more familiar with it, so he finally chose to cooperate with Stanford University. With the intervention of Li Xuan, the MIPS architecture, which started later, took the lead in completing the research and development and launched a mature commercial processor.

The b-risc architecture presided over by Professor Patterson is not not excellent, and the b-rise architecture in another time and space was bought out by SUN, a giant of workstation computers, and developed into the famous SPARC architecture. However, the B-Rise architecture in this world was taken into the pocket by Intel in advance.

And in another time and space. The R-2000, the first commercial processor in the MIPS architecture, was first used in DEC's workstation computers. Now, however, DEC is preparing to use Intel's i8610 processors.

Over time. History is becoming more and more unrecognizable. In another time and space, both DEC and Apple were at the vanguard of opposition to Intel. And now Dongfang Electronics has replaced Intel as the number one demon in the industry.

If the Dongfang Company wants to maintain its dominant position, it must muster up 12 points of energy to constantly deal with the challenges launched by other competitors! The leading position in technology is the most unreliable, and Li Xuan himself knows this very clearly.

For example, Intel's latest i8610 processor has a performance comparable to the S-100 processor based on the MIPS architecture of the Oriental Research Institute. However, there are countless examples of technologically advanced products that eventually fail in the market competition.

It has been two years since the launch of the S-100 of the Oriental Research Institute, and it has established a good reputation in the market. In particular, the world's fastest supercomputer "Pearl of the Orient" launched by the Eastern Bloc not long ago also uses the S-100A processor.

The Eastern Bloc took advantage of this opportunity. It also touted the performance of the S-100 processor. And after two years of almost no competitive sales, the S-100 processor has not only recovered all the R&D costs, but also created a lot of profits for the Oriental Research Institute.

Now that competing products have begun to appear, the Oriental Research Institute immediately and decisively directly reduced the ex-factory price of the S-100 processor by 25%. This is definitely a slap in the face for the i8610 processor, which has just hit the market.

Intel wants to open up sales for its new processors, and naturally it will be more competitive in price than the already famous S-100. And the sharp price reduction of the S-100 has disrupted the pricing system of the i8610 at once.

Intel's new products that have not been tested by the market are more expensive than the star processor S-100, which has been recognized by the market, and downstream manufacturers are naturally reluctant to choose Intel's products.

Intel had already suffered a similar loss on ERM-1 when 80286 went public. Intel isn't actually unprepared. It soon offered a promotional discount to make the i8610 actually cheaper than the Oriental Institute's S-100.

Intel has actually invested a lot of resources in the development of this i8610 processor. And due to the continuous loss of the memory business, Intel's internal financial statement is actually not good. So before the Oriental Research Institute made a move. Intel is also unwilling to take the initiative to sell at a low price as soon as it comes up, which will strictly compress the sales profit of i8610.

In addition to waging a price war against rivals, the Eastern Bloc has a dense set of combo punches. After nearly five years of continuous efforts. Li Xuan has built a complete defense system in the entire computer industry.

At present, most of the competitors are still only in a single field. Compete with the Eastern Bloc. And the Eastern Bloc has begun to take advantage of its integration to achieve successive victories. Although companies like Intel, DEC, Apple. It was also found that it was necessary to unite against Dongfang Electronics.

But the defense system built by the Eastern Bloc is by no means easy to tear apart. For example, the external liaison and news gathering and editing center built by the Oriental Group for the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee is a promotion and display platform built by the Oriental Group in order to show the charm of information office in the personal computer era in an all-round way.

The entire center consists of 10 servers and 350 PCs, forming a large internal local area network. Except for a small number of computers used by the staff of the Olympic Organizing Committee, most of the computers in the office center are available 24 hours a day free for the use of journalists from various countries.

On each computer, Dongfang Company has installed office software, typesetting software and other commercial software that is convenient for reporters to write. And these apps are also available in different languages.

A BBS forum has also been set up on the intranet, where all the schedule information of the Olympic Games and the official announcements of the Olympic Organizing Committee will be published on the forum as soon as possible. Journalists can not only log in to this forum at any time to browse this information, but also create their own personal accounts and initiate topic discussions on the forum. (To be continued......)