Although supercomputers are far inferior to mainframes in commercial applications, there is still a significant market in many scientific research fields. For example, when the Oriental Research Institute is developing chips, the use of supercomputers can improve efficiency. Of course, ordinary semiconductor design companies can't be so extravagant.

In addition, supercomputers are used in many fields, such as wind tunnel testing when automakers develop new models, chemical formula synthesis when pharmaceutical companies develop new drugs, weather forecasting, oil exploration, and many other fields. Cray's sales exceeded $100 million last year, and it can be said that this market still has a certain scale.

Of course, Chen Shiqing's ability to do business is far less strong than his ability to engage in research and development, Li Xuan remembers this academician of the American Academy of Engineering, and later failed to run the company and made a salary arrears, which was widely reported by the media.

"Mr. Li, the design idea of large-scale parallel processing that you proposed before, after careful thinking about it recently, I think it is indeed very imaginative, and it is likely to be the direction of supercomputer development in the future!" Chen Shiqing's eyes flashed with a fine light, and he said sternly.

For a senior talent like Chen Shiqing, the temptation of pure money is not so great. Although his net worth is not a multimillionaire or a billionaire, he still has assets of several million US dollars, which is enough for the whole family to live comfortably in the United States for a lifetime. For Chen Shiqing, the attraction of pursuing his own career and constantly climbing the peak is greater.

Therefore, when Li Xuan communicated with him before, in addition to offering a series of preferential treatments, he also discussed with him the direction of future supercomputer research and development. At present, the guiding idea of the research and development of supercomputers is the vector processing technology proposed by the founder of Clay Company. To put it simply, it is to optimize the internal structure of the processor. The potential performance of the processor is continuously exploited by continuously compressing the clock cycles required to complete a single instruction.

But as the clock cycle approaches the physical limit. The maximum performance of the processor will eventually reach a bottleneck. In the future, the idea of supercomputers will shift to massively parallel processing (MPP), which is simply stacked chips. The number of processors is constantly increasing to improve the overall performance of the computer.

The key to MPP technology is to maximize the performance of multiple processors at the same time, so that one plus one equals two as much as possible. For example, the "Tianhe-2" supercomputer used 32,000 12-core Xeone5 main processors, 48,000 Xeonphi coprocessors, and 4,096 domestic FT-1500 processors.

It is necessary to create a supercomputer with a total of more than 80,000 processors and a supercomputer with a maximum performance of 4,900 trillion operations per second. By no means an easy task.

The current Caryx-MP supercomputer runs at a speed of only 914 million times per second, which is less than one-fifth of the future "Tianhe-2" supercomputer, and there is still a lot of room for improvement.

Compared with the previous vector computing processing to improve computer performance, the biggest difference in MPP technology is that there is no need to customize a special vector processor, and only a general-purpose processor can be used. This circumvents Cray's patent barriers in vector processing technology.

Later, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory once built a very special supercomputer. The supercomputer, named the "Condor Swarm", is unique in that it is a combination of 1,760 Sony PS3 game consoles, and its computing speed once ranked 33rd in the world. Li Xuan was naturally not prepared to develop such a nonsensical supercomputer.

The "Pearl of the Orient" project will use the S-100 processor newly developed by the Oriental Research Institute. In another space-time, the MIPS architecture was used by Silicon Valley graphics companies to develop several supercomputers. These supercomputers are widely used in the synthesis of various CG lenses in Hollywood blockbusters, including "Jurassic Park", "Titanic" and other films.

"The first $3 million in funding for the Pearl of the Orient project has been disbursed to your account, and your team will have the full support of the entire Oriental Group, as well as the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong!" Li Xuan told Chen Shiqing.

He prepared $10 million in R&D funding for the "Pearl of the Orient" supercomputer project. Hopefully, it will be possible to produce results within three years. The research and development of supercomputers is a huge system project, and Oriental Research Institute, Oriental Software Company, Oriental Semiconductor Company, etc. will give special cooperation and support.

If Chen Shiqing can successfully develop the world's fastest supercomputer, the benefits to the entire Dongfang Electronics Company and the S-100 processor will definitely be huge. But the development of a supercomputer does not happen overnight.

For Li Xuan, what he is most concerned about now is naturally the success or failure of the second structure of the Oriental Research Institute. And this depends on the first application of the S-100 processor, the CW-8203 workstation computer just launched by Aikang. CW is an abbreviation for PuterWorkstation. The 8203 represents the listing in March 1982.

The CW-8203 workstation is divided into two models: A and B, according to the frequency of the S-100 processor and the configuration of memory. The prices were $34,900 and $31,900, respectively. The S-100 processor integrates nearly 100,000 transistors into it, and the complexity of the design is a direct result of the low production yield.

This is also the reason why the price of a new processor is generally higher in the early days of the market. As fabs continue to improve their production processes, yield rates will slowly increase. However, less than 45% of the initial batch of S-100 processors achieved the initial design performance. Li Xuan naturally couldn't accept such a low ratio, which would greatly push up the average manufacturing cost of the S-100 processor.

But improving the yield rate of the factory is not an overnight thing, so Li Xuan can only find another way. The most effective means is naturally to reduce the frequency, many defective products do not mean that the entire chip is scrapped, but only a small area of it can not work properly, so that the overall performance does not meet the design requirements.

It is a pity that these chips are directly destroyed as waste, and they can be specially shielded from damaged areas, although it will cause performance degradation, but it is still a normal processor. After this downscaling, the S-100 processor is divided into two versions with different frequencies, A and B, and the overall yield rate has reached 65%.

"Well, okay, Albert, that's good news again! The order from ILM is proof that our workstations are just as capable of graphics processing. Previously, Dongfang Software Company acquired a CAD (computer-aided design) software development company, and I think CW workstations can also be bundled with their software, after all, there is a great demand for advanced workstations in the field of semiconductor design!"

Li Xuan hung up the phone, just now the news brought by Albert Hawke, the president of Aikang Company, is very good, Industrial Light & Magic Company decided to purchase a batch of CW-8203 workstations, which is the second major customer received from this product in less than half a month on the market.

Compared to General Motors, which purchased 300 workstations in one go, ILM purchased only 85 workstations. But the impact of this company's order on the subsequent sales of CW workstations is no less than that of Tongtong Automobile.

GM's customer represents the success of CW workstations in the field of CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing). The order from ILM has given iKang a better example to convince other companies in the graphics processing field to purchase CW workstation computers.

Moviegoers are no stranger to ILM, a computer special effects company founded by Hollywood director George Lucas in the 70s to shoot Star Wars. Most of the Hollywood blockbusters you have seen, such as "Terminator", "Avatar", "Transformers", "Harry Potter", etc., are supported by the computer special effects of Industrial Light and Magic.

In addition to computer-aided manufacturing in the industrial sector and graphics processing, computer-aided design (CAD) is also a major market for workstation computers. In fact, the first user of the CW-8203 workstation was Dongfang Electronics itself. All Oriental companies, including Oriental Research Institute, Oriental Software, and Oriental Games, have taken the lead in large-scale internal adoption of CW workstations before they are publicly listed.

The listing of the CW workstation of Aikang Company was the most affected by the original small computer market. The emergence of the previous Apollo computer company has grabbed a lot of market share of small computers. The CW-8203 workstation computer launched by Aikang Computer is much more powerful than the Apollo workstation using the MC68000 chip.

If we talk about the computing speed of the processor alone, the VAX-11 series minicomputer uses the VAX-11/780 processor developed by DEC company, and the computing rate of this processor is only 1MIPS, which is far less than the S-100 processor with an operating rate of 6MIPS. Although DEC's VAX-11 series minicomputers are designed with multiple processors in parallel, the overall performance is slightly better than that of CW workstation computers.

However, DEC's VAX-11 small machine is priced at as much as $200,000, and a special constant temperature room needs to be built, and the maintenance cost is very high. The CW-8203A workstation of Aikang Company is only priced at 34,900 US dollars, and the later maintenance is simple and convenient.

Such a disparity in price/performance ratio is already doomed, and small opportunities will die quickly in the wave of personal computers. The order from General Motors obtained by Aikang was snatched up in the competition with DEC Company. It is said that the stock price of DEC has plummeted by 20% in half a month after the listing of CW workstations. DEC was forced to urgently announce that it would launch its own workstation computer within six months. (To be continued......)