Life at the company was dull and boring, until one day, when Cairo, who was in a difficult R&D situation, walked into a bar to have a drink and relax himself, he accidentally broke into a party of technicians. www.biquge.info The people at this party are all young people who have unsatisfactory jobs in big companies such as Fairchild, Intel, and IBM, but have ideals and ambitions, and the leader is Bushnell, who has broken into the eyes of Americans with game consoles.

Carrot joins the party and articulates his ideals at the party, as well as his private research, which sparks the interest of other members, including Bushnell. So, Bushnell handed an olive branch to Carlo and others, and formed several departments, including chip design.

The difficulties in the game console business, coupled with the establishment of several new departments, made Bushnell's finances increasingly difficult, and as a last resort, Bushnell extended a helping hand to Warner Bros., and out of optimism about the future prospects of Atari, Warner accepted Bushnell's request and took over the company.

After 3 years of hard work, Carlot's chip department finally completed the design of the CPU chip on paper. Just when the entire department was overjoyed and was ready to ask Bushnell to find a chip foundry tape-out for testing, the sales of game consoles did not go well, causing Warner to express its dissatisfaction with Bushnell.

In the United States, as long as the boss is not satisfied, the person in charge under his hand has to roll up the cover and get out of the egg every minute. In the case of an extremely harsh external environment, Kailuo comforted everyone and called everyone to repeatedly check and modify the programmer, and strive to ensure that during the tape-out test, everyone would not be hindered by the programmer.

Now, the boss has taken the initiative to audit the CPU's cores, leaving Kylo both excited and worried.

I am excited that the boss has just taken over the company, and he can discover the achievements of his department, whether he understands technology or not, at least it shows that he sees the value and application prospects of this chip; And it is precisely this that worries, he is afraid that this new boss, even if he sees the value and application prospects of this chip, is reluctant to invest in follow-up research and development and production.

Because, the tape-out process is very costly, and the chip foundry tape-out is at least more than 1,000 pieces, less than this number, and people don't care about it at all. And if your own chip finds a defect or mistake when testing the tape-out, then sorry, the 1,000-piece chip will be scrapped.

But who can't guarantee that their chips can be taped out a few times, and then they will fully meet the design requirements? At least Carlo doesn't dare to guarantee it, even if it's a big company, let alone a small company that has nothing to do with chip design?

Ye Kai, who was in the office, didn't know that the person in charge of his chip design department had come to the outside of his office and was anxiously waiting for the fate of his department.

Now he was intently looking at the kernel drawings laid out on his desk, the more he looked at them, the more familiar they became, the more frightened they became, and they were more and more overlapping with the kernel circuits of a certain company that he remembered from his previous life.

After a long time, Ye Kai raised his head from these drawings, let the first half of his life lean back on the comfortable chair, closed his eyes, and fell into deep thought.

He doesn't understand why in his previous life, why did Intel use the 8088 chip, with the help of IBM, to set foot on the door of the world's top 500, and let the subsequent launch of a series of chips dominate the rivers and lakes, the foundation work of the ----- 286 chip, why did it fall into Atari, a small game console company that has nothing to do with chip design?

Is this the so-called "butterfly effect" caused by history's own intervention? Or is it because the real history of the past life was supposed to be like this?

Let's take a look at what Intel's well-documented history has to say during this period.

In the previous life, after Intel launched 8088 in 78, the repercussions in the society were not strong, and the market share was very low, and the popular ones were Motorola and Zilog's CPU chips. At that time, Intel's main business was not actually CPUs, but memory. Therefore, Intel's CPU sales department, in the next 3 years, is running around looking for a way out for its own chips.

During this period, the dismal sales made Intel's senior management shake the company's confidence in taking the road of CPU, and just when they were ready to increase investment in their main business -------- memory, IBM handed out an olive branch and prepared to purchase Intel's 8088 chips.

With the idea of emptying the inventory, Intel and its preferential price took the order from IBM without sadness or joy. Then, IBM released the world's first personal computer, the 5150, on August 12, 81, and the new market of "personal computers" was born.

Priced at $1,565, with only 16K bytes of memory, it can be downloaded and stored using a cassette tape, and it can also be equipped with a beige-looking "big box" with a 5.25-inch software disk drive, and it doesn't include a graphics card and a monochrome display, and there are very few apps available, but it's very popular.

Originally, IBM expected the total sales of the 5150 to be about 240,000 units in the next five years, but as a result, the sales in the first year had already reached this number, and by 1985, the IBM5150 sales reached nearly 1 million units.

In the two years after 1981, the number of PC manufacturers in the United States increased from 25 to 100, and annual PC sales grew from $1.8 billion to $5 billion.

According to IBM's official statement, IBMPC is the first personal computer to use general-purpose components, but I didn't expect that with the emergence of the first IBMPC clone product, it has also become an evil spirit that has haunted them for many years.

By the mid-80s, cloning PCs were gradually starting to eat into the market share of the forerunner IBM. Because IBMPC uses widely available accessories, it is easy for other manufacturers to produce their own products and decompile BIOS files.

In 1983, Compaq launched the first IBMPC clone and it became an instant hit. IBM may have wanted to make its products more patented, and there have been people within IBM who have been advocating for the promotion of hardware product patents to prevent arbitrary copying. Unfortunately, IBM's lawyers were so incompetent that they lost the lawsuit against Compaq, thus opening the floodgates of cloning and allowing anyone to produce compatible PCs.

As the saying goes, if someone is frustrated, then someone will benefit. The person who is frustrated should be IBM, and the one who benefits is Intel.

This is a typical example of the predecessors planting trees and the later people enjoying the shade!

Therefore, the most important thing to thank for Intel is not the engineers or senior executives of IBM, but the incompetent lawyers who lost the lawsuit and let the cloned products dominate!