One day in mid-March, Zhao Jaw suddenly ran into Zhang Lexing's office in a panic, and before he could even catch his breath, he hurriedly said: "Boss, the integrated motherboard of the Microelectronics Research Institute has been successfully developed!" ”

"What!" Zhang Lexing stood up suddenly, looked at Zhao Jaw and asked, "The integrated motherboard has been successfully developed?" ”

"Yes, boss, the R&D team has completed the final finalization of the integrated motherboard chipset, and then it is time to enter the production process." Zhao Jaw said excitedly.

Zhang Lexing rubbed his hands happily, he originally intended to promote the research and development of integrated motherboards, in order to speed up the speed of computer performance improvement, regardless of whether the development of Intel and AMD processors can be accelerated, at least in terms of image processing, the development of games will be relatively less restrictive, at least the PC will be shorter when it is ridiculed by game console players as stupid and stupid.

When 3DFX's VooDoo generation graphics cards appeared, they brought such hope to computer gamers, but unfortunately, the price of VooDoo graphics cards was not acceptable to most people. Zhang Lexing's idea is to take the integrated graphics card as a breakthrough, starting from the 2D and 3D performance of the graphics card, and accelerate the speed of improving the graphics processing capacity of the PC.

Now that his company's integrated motherboard has been successfully developed, Zhang Lexing is already a little impatient, he wants to see with his own eyes what the chipset of the integrated motherboard looks like and what kind of performance it has.

"Zhao Jaw, let people prepare the car, I want to go and see it now." Zhang Lexing calmed down his excitement and explained to Zhao Jaw.

"Okay boss, please wait." Zhao Jaw nodded, turned around and left Zhang Lexing's office.

……

After preparing the car, Zhang Lexing and Ma Guanghai came to the parking lot, got into the Mercedes-Benz S600, and Zhao Jaw also followed into the car. Then three commercial vehicles full of bodyguards were used as the lead, Mercedes-Benz S600 was in the center, and the other three commercial vehicles were the rearguard, and the whole convoy drove to the Oriental Institute of Microelectronics. The reason why there is such a big battle is also because of the accident that happened last year, although Chu Jing has calmed down the incident, but it has brought a lot of stimulation to Andatai Security Company, coupled with the same incident that happened last year, Li Zeju was kidnapped, Andatai Security Company no longer dared to be careless, and always maintained the highest level of security measures, in addition to the accompanying six cars, there were people to protect the key nodes along the way, in short, the same thing could not happen again and again.

The convoy drove safely all the way into the Oriental Institute of Microelectronics, and exchanged a few polite words with Vice President Ye who came to greet him, and then under his leadership, Zhang Lexing and his party came to the conference room of the Institute. There were already a few people waiting in the conference room, one of them was Tang Wenyuan, who introduced the verification integration motherboard last year, and it seemed that Zhao Jaw had contacted him before he came.

Vice President Ye followed into the conference room, he noticed Zhang Lexing's puzzled eyes, and first introduced Tang Wenyuan: "Mr. Zhang, I think you should still have the impression that he is Tang Wenyuan, the chief researcher of the integrated motherboard research group. Next to him are Dr. Changli Wang from the innovation company, Dr. Bill Daly from Nvidia and Dr. Yoni Kenig from ATI (Yetian), and the team led by the three of them has made great efforts in the research and development of display core and audio processing chips in this project......

With the introduction of Vice President Ye, Zhang Lexing reached out and shook hands with these R&D personnel one by one, and also said a few words of encouragement to narrow the distance between the two sides.

After Vice President Ye finished his introduction, everyone sat down separately, gathered around the oval table in the conference room, Tang Wenyuan also turned on the computer and projector, called up a PPT file, and began his introduction to the integrated motherboard chipset.

"Mr. Zhang, our main achievement this time is the motherboard chipset composed of Southbridge and Northbridge chips, the design code of Southbridge is '212', and the design code of Northbridge chip is '311'. The Southbridge chip focuses on functionality, mainly including the control of PCI bus and keyboard and mouse interfaces, and integrates sound cards and network cards. The Northbridge chip focuses on communication management, mainly including memory controller, graphics interface controller, front-side bus controller and North-South Bridge bus controller and other four logic components, and integrates our latest design of high-performance display core AN128S, which is jointly developed by the team of Bill Daly and Dr. Yoni Kenig, and is also a simplified version of the AN128 graphics card to be released by Nvidia and ATI (Yetian), in order to give full play to its performance, The AGP interface used by Intel Corporation last year ......"

Zhang Lexing remembers the last time I looked at the verification integration motherboard, the motherboard still used the 3DRage chip logic provided by ATI, I didn't expect that such a big change had occurred in just over a year, and it actually became jointly developed by Nvidia (NVIDIA) and ATI (Yetian), it seems that 3DFX has brought too much pressure to these two companies.

Zhang Lexing's guess is right, 1996 was a bumper year for 3DFX company, not only its launch of the VooDoo generation of display sub-cards has won the favor of many graphics card manufacturers, with the E3 exhibition to support VooDoo graphics card "Tomb Raider" became an instant hit, VooDoo graphics card has also become the new favorite of players, coupled with the global memory price plummeting has brought about a significant drop in the production cost of VooDoo graphics card, for a time VooDoo graphics card has become a hot commodity, 3DFX has also gone one step further with VoodooRUSH, a graphics card that includes both 2D and 3D processing power.

And Nvidia (Nvidia) and ATI (Yetian) company did not go well during this time, 95 years Nvidia finally spent two years to tinker with an NV1, although the performance is not bad, but later with the establishment of the Direct3D standard and GLIDE (VooDoo graphics card special) popular, NV1 suddenly became a commodity that no one cared about, Nvidia suffered huge losses because of this, and even NV1 R & D expenses were not fully recovered. In order to develop a Direct3D-compatible graphics card, Nvidia also had to lay off employees, and later thanks to Zhang Lexing's investment like charcoal in the snow, Nvidia was pulled back from the edge of the cliff. ATI is in a slightly better situation, after all, it is an old company, but the highly-anticipated 3DRage display core encountered fatal compatibility problems as soon as it was launched, and then relied on the improved chip 3DRageII to barely grab back some of the market. However, for these two companies, the originally inconspicuous 3DFX has quickly grown into a huge threat, and the empathetic Nvidia and ATI companies have finally come together to jointly develop a product that completely defeats 3DFX, codenamed "AN128", so there is a simplified version of the core AN128S integrated on the motherboard.

Tang Wenyuan used the pointing pen in his hand to gesture on the projection screen, while continuing to introduce the performance of the integrated motherboard chipset: "...... The AN128S core uses the AGP2x interface, has a data transfer bandwidth of up to 533MB/s, a fill rate of up to 100Mpixel/s, and a hardware triangle generation engine that can generate 5 million triangles per second...... It integrates MPEG-2 special decoding chip, supports DVD hardware decoding, and has high-speed DVD playback function...... The sound card part uses the SoundBlasterAWE32 chip logic improved by the innovative company, which has almost the same functions as the SoundBlasterAWE32 sound card, and can add a hardware wavemeter sub-card through a dedicated expansion slot on the motherboard. …… The network card part uses the Hess-100A chip logic derived from the network switching technology of the San Jose Research Institute, with 10/100M self-adaptation, and the dedicated ASIC chip optimizes the data transmission between the network interface and the PCI bus, which greatly reduces the CPU usage during network communication and improves the efficiency of data exchange compared with the original Hess-100 chip......"

After putting the PPT file on the computer, Tang Wenyuan took out a motherboard from under the table and put it in front of Zhang Lexing, and then said: "Mr. Zhang, this is the engineering model we designed, which can support Intel's latest Pentium MMX processor......"

Zhang Lexing looked at the motherboard in front of him, which did not appear in the days he had experienced, and couldn't help but feel a lot of excitement and emotion. The motherboard in front of me is a model of engineering, and the workmanship is naturally very fine, but this is not the point, the key is that the performance of this motherboard is very attractive.

After flipping through the motherboard in his hand and looking at it a few times, Zhang Lexing put down the motherboard and asked Tang Wenyuan: "Is the production cost of this chipset high?" ”

This question is very critical, Zhang Lexing knows that those who only care about performance and do not care about the price are a minority after all, and these people usually do not consider integrating motherboards, so only the affordable price can occupy the market and play a role in promoting the performance of computers.

Tang Wenyuan seemed to have made preparations in this regard before, and replied directly: "Mr. Zhang, we have evaluated this aspect, if our chipset is used to produce motherboards, the price will be 22.5% lower than the current mainstream products, and the performance can be increased by about 45%......"

After listening to Tang Wenyuan's introduction, Zhang Lexing nodded with satisfaction, this chipset looks quite competitive and should be able to achieve its purpose. In fact, Zhang Lexing can also let his own company produce motherboards, but this is equivalent to pushing other motherboard factories to the opposite side, just like the stupid trick made by 3DFX after acquiring STB's graphics card factory. In his opinion, if you want to promote this kind of chipset, the better way is to learn from MIPS companies, only do research and development and not direct production, and increase the number of partners who are willing to produce through lower licensing fees.

Soon after, a new company was established to promote the newly developed and successful chipset based on a part of the integrated motherboard R&D team, and the chipset of the integrated motherboard was also named EC6500 (including EC6506, EC6507, EC6508, from low to high performance and low to high price).

At the beginning of April, Dongfang Chip Technology Co., Ltd. held a grand new product launch conference in Hong Kong, officially launched the EC6500, an epoch-making chipset, and displayed the engineering model and the computer assembled from it. Representatives of the VisualSystem Group, as well as representatives of the world's top motherboard manufacturers such as ASUS, MSI, and Gigabyte in the future, as well as representatives from Intel Corporation, also sent representatives to congratulate the EC6500 because it only supports their processors. Many computer manufacturers saw the potential of EC6500 from this press conference, and more importantly, its more affordable production cost attracted their attention and began to pay attention to the subsequent development of EC6500.

After the press conference, ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte and other motherboard manufacturers also announced that they will produce corresponding motherboards based on the EC6500 series chipsets, they value the support of the VisualSystem Group behind the EC6500, and they don't want to leave themselves behind because of a wrong side. Under the joint operation of Oriental Industrial Group and VisualSystem Group, the news of EC6500 chipsets began to appear frequently in major computer media, and even some outdoor advertisements flashed EC6500.

Under the bombardment of complex information, EC6500 has become the hottest term, and it has also become the latest spoken word for many computer enthusiasts, and many companies are also interested in EC6500 because of the low price and high performance mentioned in the advertisement, after all, whether it is a business or an individual, except for some fanatical enthusiasts, most people still hope to spend less and do more.

Of course, there are side effects, because the EC6500 is so popular, many users who are tempted by its performance and price have been waiting and seeing, looking forward to the launch of the motherboard with the EC6500 chipset, and looking forward to the computer using the EC6500 chipset motherboard on the shelves, which led to a sharp drop in computer sales in three months, until the unsalable situation of the KN97 motherboard with the EC6508 chipset of ASUS was eased.

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