Chapter 1205 Disturbing the Chip Circle

Putting down the phone, Atletico turned his head to look to the side.

Seeing this, Lao Wei hurriedly sat up straight and put on a posture of taking the exam seriously.

"Okay, okay, who is doing this for?"

Waving his hand to signal the other party to relax, Atletico turned the conversation to production.

Combined with relevant reports and personal experience, he confirmed that there was no problem with the appearance and function of the new product, and the only thing to worry about was the production aspect. With so many new technologies used on Jet1, there will definitely be a lot of stumbling blocks at the beginning, and it is impossible to grasp all the situations by relying on the various reports that have been reported from below.

"It's mostly fine, but it's ......"

Hearing the boss's question, Wei Huailiang decisively turned on the mode of complaining and complaining.

Atletico was right, and the jet1 did encounter a lot of problems in the production process.

In order to pursue the ultimate appearance experience, this mobile phone uses a lot of customized components and modules, such as the punch-hole screen of butterfly display, the fill light module of Jiajing Varitronix, the ultrasonic fingerprint reader of Bee Acoustics, the ultrasonic directional earpiece, and the microtube microphone. Seeing that the design of new products is finalized and is about to enter the stage of production and stocking, the suppliers of these parts have said that they have encountered capacity problems.

Although the annual income is only half of that of a well-known trade, industry and technology enterprise, and there is no convenient subsidy cheating channel for others, the funds spent by Bee on research and development are more than twice that of "the conscience of the United States". The funds are relatively abundant, and there is Atletico Madrid, an open-minded person, who has deliberately guided them to avoid detours, and some achievements have been made in the past few years, such as the new technologies above.

Although the high-end equipment used in R&D is expensive, most of them are universal, and if you buy one for a long time, you can still find other companies to rent it.

What really spends money is actually the salary of talents, the starting salary of doctors is 7k, the starting salary of masters is 6k, the annual salary of senior experts is ordinary, plus various bonuses of social security and commercial insurance, the 100-person R&D team does nothing, and the salary expenses alone are tens of millions. Large technology companies have always had tens of thousands of R&D personnel, and it is not uncommon for R&D to invest tens of billions of dollars.

If you change to a Silicon Valley company like Google, Apple, and Cisco, and the salary unit is converted to dollars, you have to offer an annual salary of at least $100,000 with a little work experience.

This is also an important reason why domestic telecommunications and Internet companies can overtake in corners and catch up with and surpass their international counterparts in great strides.

It's just that the "crowd tactics" can only work in the R&D stage, and when it comes to production, it is not very bright.

The more advanced the product, the more high-specification production equipment is needed, and many of them need to be customized.

Bee Semiconductor's processors can find foundry foundry foundry, Bee Mobile also has Futukang, Pegatron and other foundry companies to help assemble the output, Butterfly Display, Jiajing Varitronix, and Bee Acoustics are self-developed and self-produced, and if you want to expand production, you have to spend money to transform the equipment.

In the face of the component orders issued by Bee Mobile, the three CEOs spread their hands together, indicating that the company had no money.

It's not that there is really no money, as a leading domestic component manufacturer, their product profit margin has always been good, and there is no problem with the capital side, the question is why?

Jiajing Varitronix is a subsidiary of Jiajing Holdings, theoretically at the same level as Bee Group; Butterfly Display is a joint venture between Bee Holdings and an external company, and the opinions of shareholders on the other side must be considered; together with the bee acoustics of a door, it also has its own small abacus. Retrofitting a production line to produce customized products is expensive, but the revenue expectations are not clear enough, so they are naturally suspicious.

This is how things are in the world, there are gains and losses.

If a big pot of rice is played in a game of chess, it is inevitable that the problem of slackness and laziness will lead to the reduction of efficiency; accounting for one's own profits and losses alone will lead to mutual sharing. The performance of each company and department is independent, and they are naturally not willing to sacrifice their own performance and bonuses for the performance of others.

As more and more industries are involved in bees and Jiajing, and the business departments are becoming more and more detailed, this kind of "each sweeping the snow before the door" situation will only be more and not less.

In the face of this kind of problem, the easiest way is to do business, as long as we come up with sufficiently generous conditions for cooperation, the "brothers" will naturally not refuse to cooperate more. This is also the condition that several companies have given Bee Mobile, and they want the latter to share the cost and risk of renovating the production line.

The reason why Wei Huailiang flew to Egret Island to meet Atletico Madrid was because of this. If he agrees to make a contribution, the amount of funds to be used is obviously beyond the scope of his authority, and he needs the nod and authorization of the big boss; if he does not plan to make money, he also needs the big boss to mediate and talk about feelings and strategies.

Frowning and pondering for a while, Atletico opened his eyes and made his decision.

Turning his head to look to the side, "Mr. Wei, do you remember the purpose of our mobile phone to build Black Jade?"

"Of course," the latter nodded decisively, "to end the battle over the definition of all-screen." ”

This is an official statement, in fact, they both know that Bee Mobile created this mobile phone in order to block friends.

As soon as Heiyu came out, those so-called full-screen mobile phones with foreheads and chins and a screen-to-body ratio of less than 90% were really fiercely complained by netizens, and the publicity momentum was sluggish. Later, because Heiyu never announced the listing time, this wave of complaints was smaller.

During the BRICS summit at the beginning of the month, Atletico Madrid took advantage of the geographical convenience to operate the concept version of black jade representing the image of Heron Island into a national gift of the conference, so that this product once again gained high-density exposure.

When Apple held an autumn conference and released two new mobile phones, iPhone 8 and iPhone X, the bee Heiyu, which fell ahead of schedule, was even more involved in it and was discussed by various comparisons.

The iPhone 8 is just a performance upgrade, and the appearance has not changed much, but the iPhone X, which is a 10th anniversary product, is refreshing. The phone has a full-screen design, removing the chin and forehead, then digging a groove at the top of the screen to make it a "cat ear display", and then placing modules such as a front-facing camera and facial recognition device in the middle space. This compromise effectively stretches the viewable area, but it also affects app interaction, user experience, and appearance, which is what a company with strong appeal like Apple dares to play.

However, users are picky after all, compared to other products that still retain the chin, iPhone X is naturally superior, and when opponents come up with a "real full screen" bee black jade, supporters can only spray the latter There are only a few dozen units, and it makes no sense to say that there are more things that can't be bought.

From this point of view, the most important thing for bees to do is to make the black jade mobile phone available, and then to calculate the production capacity and sales.

Seeing that the other party had an understanding, Atletico said with a smile his arrangement, "The cost of the transformation of the production line can be funded in three ways, you, them, and the group, everyone shares the risk." The initial scale can be smaller, first ensure that there are machines ready to put on the market, and then slowly increase the production capacity. ”

As for the specific output, this requires a special person to investigate several compromises, but he doesn't need to pat his head to think about it.

After talking about the matter, the two chatted about the recent situation in the industry.

Speaking of these, Lao Wei was also full of words to say.

Holding the tea made by the boss himself, Wei Huailiang took a deep breath of tea, and then spoke: "The situation in the past two years has been really chaotic, and mobile phone companies and design companies have closed down every three or five times. Dave also went to jail for it. ”

The machine circle is so big, and it used to be mixed in the town, so Lao Wei naturally knew the acting president. Seeing his former predecessors and opponents in prison, he was also embarrassed in his heart.

Atletico Madrid did not have this feeling of sadness, and showed disdain: "Motorola was sold twice because of poor management, what good results can the Moto foundry have? The local government did not clean up his account until this year, and it is already very accommodating and tolerant." ”

"Oh?" Lao Wei looked up at Atletico Madrid, "Since the station is official, are you willing to invest over there?"

"How is it possible?" Atletico gave him a blank look, "We have the confidence and competitiveness, we don't need this kind of accommodation, just do business." ”

didn't want to talk about it in depth, so he pulled the conversation back, "If you really want to think about it, this wave of mobile phone companies and foundries is not all bad." ”

Mobile phones, tablets and other smart terminal industries have long fallen into the predicament of overcapacity and low-price competition, with Qualcomm collecting communication patent fees and Samsung memory flash memory rising prices, those companies that play small profit competition are naturally going out of business.

For workers and local communities, widespread business closures are naturally a bad thing. However, for the industry, the wave of bankruptcy can play a role in eliminating the weak and retaining the strong and purifying the market. For industry giants like Bee Mobile, it is even more dangerous, and the mid-range models of Bee, the low-end models of "Little Bee" enterprises, and the shared mobile phones of Bee Green Lai have benefited a lot.

"I'd rather stay the same," Wei Huailiang smacked his mouth, "Now although the turnover has gone up, the profit margin has dropped a lot, and the money has been earned by Samsung and Qualcomm." ”

Samsung is a dominant company in the field of memory chips, mastering the largest high-end production capacity, Qualcomm is still proud in the 4G era, 3.25% of the patent fee is guaranteed by drought and flood, and the majority of downstream manufacturers have no countermeasures at all, so they can only pinch their noses and endure silently. At most, we can pin our hopes on the early expansion of production by relevant enterprises and the arrival of the 5G era.

It's a pity that the 5G standard is still in the discussion stage, and the official commercial use will not be until 2020, and the changes in the storage industry are not too big.

As for the high hopes of ordinary users, Unisplendour Guoxin and Yangtze River Storage, the former's DDR4 and LPDDR4 (low voltage and low power consumption, mainly used for mobile phones) memory chips have only passed the evaluation of scientific and technological achievements in the first half of the year, and there is still a long way to go before they are put into production and listed to replace imports;

complained about the bad appearance of Samsung and Qualcomm, and Lao Wei turned the artillery fire to Intel and Arm.

"It's hard to digest the crazy cost of memory flash memory, and now the CPU has problems again, which is really worry-free. ”

In June this year, the Google-led Project Zero hacking team disclosed two CPU vulnerabilities to Intel, AMD, Arm and other processor manufacturers, which only exist in Intel chips (meltdon) and the more common "spectre". After the processor manufacturers, Apple, Microsoft, the Linux Foundation, and Bee also got the news one after another, and all of them devoted themselves to solving these two vulnerabilities.

"Heh," hearing his complaint, Atletico also sighed: "This is no way, the loopholes have long existed, but Google and Intel have bigger heads, and they are just the ones who pull the emperor's new clothes to the children and the emperor." ”

As Atletico said, these two loopholes have existed for a long time, but they have not been taken seriously.

In 1995, DEC's Alpha 21264 processor was born, with out-of-order execution technology to process four instructions at the same time in each cycle, pushing the processor frequency to 300MHz in one fell swoop, stunned Intel, AMD, IBM and other processor manufacturers.

In 1998, DEC was acquired by PC manufacturer Paq, which failed to integrate two companies with very different styles, and was acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HP) four years later, and the DEC and Compaq brands were also shelved. If it weren't for the world's first supercomputer "Taihu Light" using technology derived from the alpha architecture, this former powerhouse would not be remembered at all.

Although the alpha architecture failed to achieve commercial success, its winning formula was carried forward by Intel, AMD, MIPS, IBM, ARM, and other vendors. Today, branch prediction, out-of-order execution, and speculative execution have become the standard technologies for high-performance processors, and they are embarrassed to say hello to others.

Traditional programming requires programmers to be proficient in hardware, using 0101 machine code programming, and later assembly language and even C, Java and other high-level languages, although greatly reducing the workload of programmers, but also resulting in the program is too rigid, can not play well in the performance of the processor.

In response to this situation, processor developers have prepared three major technologies: branch prediction allows the processor to guess which branch the next program is most likely to jump to, out-of-order execution allows the processor to execute instructions in the original order of the program, and it is possible to complete the work ahead of schedule, and speculative execution can execute the predicted program branch in advance to better complete the task ahead of schedule. With this, the processor will become more flexible in the face of rigid programs, which in turn will significantly improve execution efficiency and performance.

It's just that out-of-order execution isn't all good.

The processor reads and executes instructions in advance, which also gives illegal instructions the opportunity to run ahead of time, bypassing defenses. By constructing appropriate instructions, hackers can gain access to specific areas of sensitive data, potentially escalating privileges and breaching the system.

The reason why the vulnerability has not been found for more than 20 years is that there used to be a sieve-like indos, and hackers have no shortage of easy-to-use vulnerabilities; second, the entry threshold of this vulnerability is too high, and it needs to be proficient in CPU instructions, and ordinary people can't play it; third, it is also due to interests, and the rapid development of cloud computing has attracted the attention of the hacker circle, and then some people have begun to use this kind of vulnerability to "knock on the side" of cloud servers.

There are vulnerabilities and patches, and now the industry's practice is to modify the operating system kernel to insure the out-of-order execution and speculative execution operations, but this is certainly safe, but it is inevitable to pay the price of performance loss, but fortunately, the most affected are the old machines and cloud computing manufacturers, and the impact on ordinary users is relatively small.

"Tsk," put down the teacup, Wei Huailiang suddenly said: "MTK is about to be cool, I can't imagine that this wave will win a new turnaround, 8-core A53 perfectly avoids the ghost loophole, or becomes the biggest winner!"

As a low-power core with a focus on energy consumption, ARM's Cortex-A53 uses a traditional sequential execution mechanism and is obviously not affected by vulnerabilities.

In fact, as an excellent and classic core, A53 is very widely used, Qualcomm, HiSilicon, and Bee Semiconductor are also used, and MTK is afraid that it will be even cooler. 2k reading web