Three hundred kilometers northwest of Montreal, there is a small town with a total population of less than 5,000 people, and it used to be a deserted Hughes company's factory, and there were not many people before it, and Ambrera took over as its own headquarters. After Ambrera moved there, there was a gradual increase in talent. That place was also named Raccoon Town by Ambrera.

Edson flipped through the information in his hand, he is a senior reporter for the famous "Science" magazine, and his destination today is to interview Ling Shizhe, the owner of Ambrera. The information in his hand is written on Ling Shizhe and all the information of the Ambrera company he founded, Edson carefully looked at the information in his hand, the more he looked, the more interested in Ling Shizhe, the information shows that Ling Shizhe was born in a wealthy family in Hong Kong, his first invention is a new type of mutton fat white jade porcelain, this kind of ceramics was welcomed by the European and American markets as soon as it was born, and currently occupies more than 60% of the market in the high-end ceramic market in Europe and the United States, basically in a monopoly state. After the success of ceramics, Ambrera began to enter the electronic semiconductor market, the first product launched is currently on the market fire of the computer camera, but also opened the relevant patents, at present Silicon Valley and European companies have a lot of newly born computer companies are producing computer cameras, are Ambrera company opened the technology of computer cameras, the current global computer sales to the second half of 1970 has exceeded 10 million units, the market for computer cameras is absolutely broad.

Edson was interviewing Ling Shizhe for the first time, but Edson knew that Ambrera and Science magazine had been in contact since 1969, and since 1969, the magazine has published Ling Shizhe's first article, a theoretical exposition on the RISC reduced instruction set computer, since then the design of semiconductor CPU chips has been divided from a single traditional field design to CISC complex instruction set computer and RISC reduced instruction set computer two completely different directions.

At present, most of the world's computer companies are members of the CISC camp, and the RISC camp members are currently only Ambrera Company, although this company is engaged in the production of RISC processors, but also produces the development of CISC processors, such as CE-400 (4004) and CE-8000 (8008) processors, these two processors are not yet marketable, and the sales are particularly good or arm+The two RISC processors, 1CPU and DigiId, have sold a total of 20 million chips in just one year due to the opening and licensing of computer cameras, becoming the world's largest semiconductor supplier. This practice of relying on the invention of a popular electronic product in the market, and then relying on the open patents of the relevant technology to sell its own semiconductor processors, has now been listed as a classic case by the MBA Business School and put into the MBA business textbook.

After flipping through the information in his hand, Edson was full of great interest in Ling Shizhe, the boss of Ambrera, and wanted to talk to him about his views on the development of semiconductors today. When he drove to Raccoon Town, he was shocked by the Tang style garden architecture with strong visual impact in front of him, which is a major feature of Tang style architecture, and everyone who has just come here will be shocked.

Raccoon Town Ambrera has more than 1,200 employees, this is the result of Allison's efforts to compress the staff, otherwise the number of employees will be more, now the staff community is not the first time Ling Shizhe came to see the empty scene, the community is full of people, 1600 community villas have 1200 employees and their families to move in, there will be more employees to join in the future, when the time comes, the 1600 villas are definitely not enough, now the Ambrera company has negotiated with the Montreal City GovernmentThe expansion of the staff community was doubled on its basis, and it was still unified in design, planning and management in accordance with the Tang architectural style, and the street park that was not Tang style was also added during the period.

Raccoon Town does not have its own city government, its management is entrusted to a small and medium-sized property management company called Ansray in Montreal to manage, Ambrera Company is the largest customer of this company called Ansray, and now the expansion of the community has become a well-known local property management company, in order to firmly grasp the largest customer of Ambrera Company, the company's owner Angela gave up 30% of the shares to Ambrera Company at the price, making him the only authorized property management company in Raccoon Town. This is a characteristic of Canada, this country is vast and sparsely populated, many small towns and many so-called cities do not have municipal government agencies, just such a few people, the establishment of government agencies is simply a waste of resources, the population must be more than 50,000 to have the establishment of government agencies, less than 50,000 are entrusted to large cities to help manage. A small town like Raccoon Town can't be in a small town, except for the policing management business entrusted to the police department of the city of Montreal, everything else is entrusted to the property management company, and there is nothing to manage administratively here except for the property.

The relationship between the residents here is very harmonious, there are no conflicts at all, and even if there is a big conflict, it is handled by the mobile court of the city of Montreal, and there is no need for any government agency at all. After Edson entered the town, he found that it was very quiet, the street was clean and neat, the lawn in the street park was neatly trimmed, the plants were growing luxuriantly and the flowers were in full bloom, there were few people on the street, Edson knew that this is the case in most parts of Canada, it was usually very quiet, once the family went out on the weekend, the streets and parks would be very lively, and the whole family enjoyed the weekend. What Edson didn't know was that there were two weekends here, every Friday was the last day of the workday, Saturday and Sunday were days off, and workers didn't have to go to work. With two weekends off, it's very lively from Friday night to Sunday night.

This is also a kind of welfare for local residents by Ling Shizhe, there is no bi-weekend rest day now, when Ling Shizhe moved here and found that there was no bi-weekly weekend here, as soon as the factory entered the right track, he announced the rule of two rest days a week, except for the workers who worked in three shifts, every Saturday and Sunday were the rest days of the workers, as soon as this regulation was announced, the whole company was cheering loudly, of course, the workers in three shifts were excepted, after all, the factory could not be stopped, As compensation for shift workers, Ling Shizhe gave five days of paid leave for more than a year to a total of 30 days as compensation for shift workers.

Edson came to the office building of Ambrera Company, and after contacting the company's front desk, a secretary guided him directly to Ling Shizhe's office on the top floor of the company, and after the secretary got out of coffee, Edson took out his interview plan and handed it to Ling Shizhe, saying: "Mr. Jester, this is my interview plan, you take a look first, if there is no problem, let's start." ”

Ling Shizhe took Edson's interview plan, and did not look at it but handed it directly to Angel next to her, she is the head of the company's public relations crisis management department, 40 years old this year, with many years of experience in corporate crisis public relations, Ling Shizhe showed her the interview plan, just to let her check it, to see if there are any traps in the plan, to know which reporters are very good at playing word games, in order to increase the sales of newspapers and magazines, it is simply to do everything, all kinds of text traps are difficult to guard against, professional ethics, hum, to hell, how can there be money to come. In history, many outstanding entrepreneurs were framed and slandered because they did not investigate and were dug into traps, and in the end, the company suffered heavy losses and even went bankrupt. In a lawsuit, others have your evidence in their hands, how do you fight, in addition to those newspapers are people who have the right to speak, a pen can write how you want, anyway, they have your evidence in their hands, they are not afraid of you and the lawsuit, no matter how you fight, you will lose, who told you not to be cautious and fall into the trap of others, you deserve it, no one comes to sympathize with you, you can only blame yourself.

In fact, since Ling Shizhe's computer camera opened up the relevant technology, Ambrera has become the world's largest semiconductor supplier by relying on the relevant authorization of the camera, and there are no newspapers and media asking him to interview Ling Shizhe himself, but he did not agree, just to prevent the reporter from setting a trap for him and stepping into it without knowing it. But he knows that this is not the case, the media and the enterprise are a delicate relationship that depends on each other, the newspaper needs the enterprise to buy his advertising, the enterprise needs the newspaper to promote his products, and no one can do without anyone. Ling Shizhe doesn't accept interviews for a short time, but after a long time, he will be collectively boycotted by the media, what does the survival of the media depend on, isn't it all kinds of news, without news, will those citizens buy their newspapers? Nobody buys, and those businesses will advertise there? A vicious circle comes down, and then how do you call those media to live?

When the non-powered natural energy pump irrigation system and digital ranch in the ranch were born, there was an endless stream of people who came to visit the Poetry's ranch, and Ambrera became a world-renowned company.

After Angel came to the company, with the support of Ling Shizhe, he established a crisis public relations department as quickly as possible, and screened out the interview requests of three newspapers from many interview applications, "Science" magazine is one of them, before Edson came to interview, Ling Shizhe had already accepted the interview of the previous two, and after accepting the interview of "Science" magazine, he could take a break.

After reading the interview plan, Angel nodded to Ling Shizhe, handed the plan to him, and then sat quietly on the side.

Edson is also used to it, he knows that it is not easy to interview the bosses of those large companies, the bosses of those large companies always have too many and various needs, it is very difficult to serve, if they can't meet their needs, the interview is simply an impossible task. This kind of work of interviewing the bosses of large companies is a chore, and many people in the newspaper are reluctant to take this kind of work, and finally it ends up on Edson, who is a senior reporter of the newspaper and has been doing this kind of unpopular work since he joined the newspaper, and it has been 20 years now. To be honest, he doesn't like to take this kind of work, this kind of work is thankless many times, and no one reads the columns he writes, and this kind of column is either paid by the company to brag about itself or a means for the newspaper to build a relationship with the company. But if he doesn't take over the newspaper, he will be fired, he is not a famous reporter, he has been in the industry for 20 years and is just an ordinary reporter, if he wants to gain a firm foothold in the journalist industry, he can only take jobs that others do not want to take.

With twenty years of rich experience in the industry, as soon as he saw Ling Shizhe's performance, he knew that they were not at ease with him, and he was afraid that he would set a trap for them, he couldn't deny it, he had seen too many of this kind of things.

Seeing Ling Shizhe's performance Ederson's first impression is that this young Chinese is very cautious, and there are very few successful Chinese in the West, this young Chinese is the first person he has seen successful in his career, and he is so young, perhaps the key to his success is his caution. Edson is not a racist, but he knows how difficult it is for a Chinese to succeed in this part of the United States, and this young Chinese may be the reason why he opened his company in Canada, Edson observed Ling Shizhe secretly thought in his heart.

"No problem, Mr. Edson, let's get started." Ling Shizhe flipped through the interview plan in his hand.

"Okay, Mr. Jester, I'll ask the first question first," Edson took out his pen and interview book and began the interview, saying, "You published a theoretical article in our Science magazine about RISC-based chips, and then your company produced the world's first ARM+1 and DigiId processors, two RISC processors, which are different from most processors on the market, how did you come up with the idea to invent the RISC processor?" ”

"To talk about this problem, we have to talk about the characteristics and development of computer work, computer computing is based on the combination of countless 0 and 1 logical judgments. Many 0s and 1s form complex logic gates, and many complex logic gates form different functional circuits, call different functional circuits to calculate the data, and produce different instruction operations. Early computers were very rudimentary, for example, the world's first electronic computer was built with electron tubes, and later transistor electronic computers appeared. These early computers were rudimentary and single-functional, and there was no architecture at that time. The different computing requirements of various industries have produced different computer models, each of which corresponds to a professional computing field. For example, petroleum, chemical engineering, mathematics, astronomy, aviation power, etc.

After the emergence of semiconductors in the sixties, computers began to enter the era of integrated circuits, and after the development of this decade, the computer structure began to become complex, the functions gradually became stronger, and the application began to be gradually extensive. In order to save costs, general commercial organizations outside the special industry can also buy and use computers, and a cross-domain computer technology has begun to appear, that is, general-purpose computers, such as DEC company PDP-8.

A mathematical function is an instruction; An access action is also a command. Countless instructions are superimposed, designed into the circuit to make an integrated circuit, which is the processor. In order to meet the needs of different fields, various companies have been based on the needs of users, their firm actions and operations, fixed lines as instructions, written into the internal circuit of the processor, instructions gradually become complex. This is the origin of the complex architecture computer, which is the CISC - Complex Instruction Set Computer that I mentioned in your journal Science.

General-purpose computers use this complex architecture processor - CISC. The user writes a program, calls the special instructions in the booster, and combines them to perform the required calculation processing. It's not impossible to design the neighborhood as a program and call it from the data memory, but how can the bookstore be integrated into the processor quickly?

It has been ten years since the birth of semiconductors, and the superimposed instructions within the processor have become more and more numerous and more complex, and various companies, various fields, and different users are trying to add their own designed instructions to the processor to facilitate their use. The expansion of the scope of computer applications has accelerated the rapid value-added of this behavior. Each new instruction has to be designed with a dedicated circuit, and the processor slowly begins to become overwhelmed by the rapid accumulation of new instructions. That's where I came up with RISC – the Reduced Instruction Set Computing Framework, which brings computers back to what they were designed for. Ling Shizhe had already prepared for these questions, and it was not difficult to answer them at all.

"So what's the difference between them, and which of the two processors is better?"

"To illustrate this problem, I first have to understand what the CPU is, the CPU is not a mysterious thing to put it bluntly, it is just an executive component, and the reason why it can be executed is also because people have made various hardware circuits in it, and people are using a certain logic to make it work in a certain order, so that the tasks that people give it can be completed. To put it simply, if you think of the CPU as a person, first of all, it must have normal working ability (executive ability), then it must have enough logical ability (be able to understand the order of doing things), and finally it must be able to understand other people's words (instruction set), so that it can work normally. Taken together, these form the so-called "architecture", which can be understood as a set of "tools", "methods" and "specifications". The tools may be different, the methods may be different, the specifications may be different, and this creates incompatibility between them -- if you show a building engineer a cook's cooking guide, he doesn't know what to do.

Computers can be logically classified into two categories, the so-called "complex instruction set" and "reduced instruction set" systems, which are the "CISC" and "RISC" that I proposed. The biggest difference between the various architectures that fall into these two classes is the way their designers think about the problem. We can go on and give an example, let's say we want to command a person to eat, so how should we command? We can give him the order to "eat" directly, or we can order him to "take a spoon first, then scoop up a spoonful of rice, then open his mouth, then bring it to his mouth, and finally swallow it". Some people think that if I first train the person receiving the order to master all kinds of complex skills (i.e., implement the corresponding complex functions in hardware), then I can use very simple commands to make him do very complex things - for example, just say "eat" and he will eat. But there are also people who think that this will make things too complicated, after all, the person receiving the order has to do very complicated things, what if you want him to eat food at this time? Do you continue to train him in the way of eating vegetables? Why can't we divide things into many very basic steps, so that the person receiving the order only needs to know very few basic skills to accomplish the same job, but the person giving the order is a little more tired - for example, now I want him to eat, just change the "scoop up a spoonful of rice" in the order to eat just now to "scoop up a spoonful of vegetables", and the problem is solved, how simple.

This is the logical difference between a "complex instruction set" and a "reduced instruction set". Some people may say that it is obviously a good reduced instruction set, but it is difficult for us to judge who is good and who is bad between them, because at present, both of them have different application fields, and they are both successful - the CE400 and CE8000 I designed are the representatives of the complex instruction set (CISC) (the prototype of the later X86 architecture), and ARM is the representative of the reduced instruction set (RISC). Even Arm's name directly indicates its technology: AdvancedRISCMerie.

At this point, you should understand why it's not easy to compare performance directly between RISC and CISC, because the design ideas between them are so different. This line of thinking led to the separation of CISCs and RISCs – the former focusing more on high-performance but at the same time high-power implementations, while the latter focused on small-size, low-power domains. In fact, there are many things that CISC is more suitable, and some other things are more suitable for RISC, for example, CISC has more advantages when performing high-density computing tasks, and RISC can have the upper hand when performing simple and repetitive work, for example, if we are holding a food competition, then CISC only needs to keep shouting "eat and eat", and RISC has to repeat the eating process over and over again. If the person in charge of shouting doesn't speak fast enough (i.e., the memory bandwidth isn't large enough), then the RISC will have a hard time eating CISC. But if we just ask two people to scoop the rice out, then the CISC is much more troublesome, because there is no such a simple action of scooping the rice in the CISC, and the RISC just needs to keep shouting "Scoop the rice, scoop the rice" and it's OK. That's the difference between CISC and RISC.

CISC actually increases the complexity of the processor itself in exchange for higher performance, while RISC gives complexity to the compiler, sacrificing program size and instruction bandwidth for a simple and low-power hardware implementation. ”

"What are the advantages and disadvantages between them?"

"The advantages of the CISC system: it can effectively shorten the microcode design time of the new instructions, and allow designers to achieve upward compatibility of the CISC system machines. The new system can use a superset of instructions that contains the earlier system, and thus the same software used on older computers. In addition, the format of the microprogram instructions matches the higher-level language, so the compiler does not have to rewrite it.

Disadvantages: The design of the instruction set and chip is more complex than that of the previous generation, different instructions require different clock cycles to complete, and the execution of slower instructions will affect the execution efficiency of the whole machine.

Advantages of the RISC system: With the same chip technology and the same running clock, the RISC system will run 2~4 times faster than the CISC. Since the RISC processor's instruction set is streamlined, its memory management unit, floating-point unit, etc., can be designed on the same chip. RISC processors are simpler to design, require less time, and can apply more advanced technologies than CISC processors to develop faster next-generation processors.

Disadvantages: The operation of multiple instructions makes it necessary for program developers to choose the right compiler carefully, and the amount of code written can become very large. In addition, RISC processors require faster memory, which is usually integrated into the processor, which is L1Cache (L1Cache).

Edson looked at his interview transcript and asked, "Jester, can I understand that the advantage of CISC is in compatibility and versatility, while the advantage of RISC is in special areas of expertise?" ”

"Yes, you're right, these two architectures of computers have their own advantages and disadvantages, and it is best to use the most suitable computer according to different fields and different needs of users."

"Okay, my harvest is over, can I go and visit your factory, I heard that you have designed a new computer for the ranch, can you take me to see it?"

Ling Shizhe said: "Yes, I will go to see my new computer on your behalf, it is the world's first RISC computer, I think you will be surprised." With that, Ling Shizhe, Edson and Angel left the office and walked towards the factory.