After Lin Qi and Steve Jobs blew each other in business, their friendship quickly warmed up. Pen | fun | pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

Of course, both of them are businessmen, and it is impossible to waste time on side matters, and they quickly get to the point, which is also the field of cooperation between the two companies.

CD-ROM！

This technology that can change the gaming industry and the computer industry will see its potential and value if you are not too stupid in the industry!

Now the CD-ROM and core patents are in the hands of Xinfei Electronics, a joint venture between Xinchuang Electronics and Philips.

Xinfei Electronic Technology Co., Ltd. has not been established for a long time, and its business is also very specialized, and it has built a huge moat around CD-related technology. Even Philips, at present, does not hold as many basic patents in CD as Xinfei Electronic Technology.

With the development of time, the influence of Xinfei Electronic Technology Company in the whole world will definitely increase!

"CD is a great technology that has changed the way people store it, and of course, I didn't realize it was great at first!" Steve Jobs gushes, "and I didn't fully understand what it meant when it was applied to storing music records." It wasn't until your Pangu console started using it to store programs, up to 600MB of programs, that I knew - fuck floppy disks, with CDs that are more than 600MB in size, who still uses 2.88MB floppy disks!"

Lin Qi nodded and said, "Yes, though, the speed at which the optical drive reads information is indeed slower than that of other storages. However, the capacity overwhelms the speed, and if you want to transfer 600MB of information to the computer, you need to change the floppy disk at least 20 times. However, only one disc is required, and the process is much more convenient and efficient than that of floppy disks. What's more, hard drives are very expensive now, and if you want to use a hard drive to run a 600MB program, you need to add at least five or six thousand dollars to buy a hard drive. However, the disc is very cheap, and the software burned in the disc costs dozens of dollars, and the optical drive only costs 300 dollars!"

At present, the world's most advanced mainframe hard disk has a capacity of only 1.27GB, and the price is more than 15,000 US dollars. How much does it weigh? It weighs at least forty or fifty kilograms! Ordinary people feel strained to carry one piece, but if they can carry two pieces, they must be a strong man!

And a CD-ROM is as high as more than 600MB, you can imagine how amazing this data is in this era!

It's a little slower than a hard drive, the key is that it's large and cheap!

This is the same as the choice of SSD and HDD in the market, the price of 120GB SSD and ITB's HDD is about the same, which one do you choose? Therefore, most people still choose a slower, but larger capacity mechanical hard drive!

"That's right!" Jobs agreed, "Although, the combination of an optical drive and a compact disc can make a personal computer suddenly change from running programs of a few megabytes to programs of several hundred megabytes, and in this way it can replace most minicomputers! I plan to launch a new generation of computers that use your company's new optical drive system." ”

"In fact, our CPU chips are also very powerful, several times stronger than the current 286 chips and 68000 chips, and the price is also very cheap, even for only $100, you can buy a CPU with 5 million floating point operations per second, which is enough to kill many small computers in seconds!" Lin Qi certainly hopes that more manufacturers will use XRM architecture chips, on the one hand, to enhance the market share of the XRM camp, so as to improve the software and hardware compatibility of the entire camp. In addition, the cost of chip production is relatively expensive, and if you can export some chips and make some profits, it will also help improve the financial situation of the chip factory.

Jobs shook his head and said: "Performance is not the most important thing, we have suffered a big loss on the 6502 chip, if we can do it again, we will not choose 6502, but directly choose Intel or Motorola products!"

Lin Qi is noncommittal, you must know that without the 6502 chip of MOS Technology, the CPU prices of Motorola and Intel will be more expensive. Even now, the price of Intel's 286 CPU is between 200~300 US dollars, and the 68000, the originator of Motorola's 680x0 architecture processor, is more expensive, because it is stronger than 286 in performance, and the market price is more than 350 US dollars!

Theoretically, Motorola's 680 architecture chip is not inferior to Intel's X86 architecture, and in terms of process, the current Motorola is not inferior to Intel. It's a pity that Motorola is IBM's competitor in many businesses, so IBM even considered the 6502 chip when it launched the PC, and before choosing Intel's chip, IBM had negotiated with Atari to buy the patent ownership of the microcomputer developed by Atari, and hoped that Atari would manufacture microcomputers for IBM, but the arrogant Atari categorically rejected IBM's olive branch.

It is precisely for this reason that the current X86 chip has become the queen chip of the PC camp. As a competitor in the PC camp, unless Jobs surrenders and transforms to the production of PC-compatible machines, he will definitely not use X86 chips!

For Steve Jobs, the best choice is Motorola. Because, the founder of MOS Technology was an engineer at Motorola. Although the 6502 architecture chip is not the same thing as the 680*0 architecture chip, there will be at least some commonalities.

To say that the chip performance is powerful, the MC68000 chip is indeed relatively strong, this is a chip with 68,000 transistors, which is also the source of its name. At the same time, MC68000 chip has 32-bit registers inside, but for compatibility, it uses 16-bit (and 24-bit) data cables, which is simply a quasi-32-bit processor, and is emasculated into a 16-bit chip peddling. Therefore, its future technical upgrades are guaranteed, and according to its architecture, it will soon be able to upgrade to 32-bit.

In fact, before Apple adopted the 68000 chip, the main buyer of this chip was the arcade division of the new start-up electronics company. To date, the arcade division of the new venture electronics company still has half of the arcade game chips with 68,000.

Of course, with the mass production of the XRM16 chip developed by the new venture electronics company, the XRM16 chip will also be used in the new arcade games. In addition, in the past, the game base of the arcade division of the new venture electronic was a bit confusing, and the company probably had more than 10 kinds of incompatible arcade boards. The way out for every hit game, even a base version of a game, does not consider using a common motherboard platform with other arcade machines.

Now it's different, the arcade market also requires the production of a set of compatible arcade motherboards, and after that, the newly developed arcade machine does not need to design the hardware from scratch, only needs to rely on the design of game software. This approach gradually made the research and development of the arcade department progress from the era of handicraft workshops to the era of large industry.

Although Lin Qi kept introducing to Jobs that the reduced instruction set is better than the complex instruction set, MC68000 chips that are both expensive and not too leading, are definitely not as good as XRM16!

However, Jobs shook his head again and again, he would rather have a MC68000 with worse performance and more expensive price, and never want the high-performance and low-price XRM16!

If MOS Technology Co., Ltd. had been a little more competitive and had launched a 16-bit chip in the early 80s, even if the performance was slightly inferior to the 286 and MC68000, Apple would have continued to use chips with this architecture. It's a pity that MOS Technology is not competitive on its own, and it has also dragged down several of its major customers.

Of course, the prospect of cooperation between CD drives and CDs is also very extensive, and Xinfei Electronics Company supplies 500,000 optical drives to Apple at a price of $300 each. In addition, 10 million blank CDs were sold to Apple for $0.5 a piece.

The price of the first batch of orders is as high as 20 million US dollars. And, immediately after the contract was concluded, Jobs paid a $2 million deposit.

Part of this batch of optical drives is ready to be upgraded for Apple II users, after all, there are a large number of Apple II stock users on the market, and it is also a kind of sincerity to provide new accessories to old customers.

In addition, Lisa computers are also preparing to use external optical drives to bring users a more powerful experience. After all, the computer itself comes with 2MB of RAM, since many programs nowadays only have a few hundred K, or even tens of K. So, 2MB of RAM feels like overperformance, but after running a program as large as a few hundred MB, the memory can show its value.

As for the Macintosh computer that is still under development, Jobs is even more brainy, canceling the floppy drive and directly replacing the optical drive.

This is even more radical than the Pangu console, which was developed as a game console, even if it mainly promoted the optical drive, but still did not dare to cancel the traditional cassette. After all, many game development companies are more accustomed to developing cassette games, and it will take time for these companies to transform into developing CD-ROM games with a capacity of several hundred MB.

But Jobs was so radical that he felt that since the CD-ROM was mature enough to be marketed, why use a floppy drive?

In a sense, Jobs was much more radical than Lin Qi, even though Lin Qi knew that the optical drive would gradually eliminate the game cartridge, floppy drive, etc. But he still retains the traditional game cartridge, and the Pangu console has a low-end notebook, only the interface to insert the game cartridge, and there is no CD-ROM......

Because, Lin Qi knows that any advanced thing to replace the old thing is not done overnight, but takes time.

It took a full decade for the CD-ROM to eliminate the game cartridge and floppy drive, and in the 90s, the game market was gradually dominated by CD-ROMs and hard disks. Even the most stubborn game manufacturers, such as Nintendo, were forced by the situation to change the technical route they adhered to. It was also in the 90s that the floppy drive gradually withdrew from the data storage market.

Therefore, it is good to abandon the old technology and not be too radical in the market where the old technology is still the mainstream, and not to adopt these old technologies.