In the laboratory of Silicon Valley Dongxing, Lin Qiangsheng was wearing a full set of dust suits and breathing apparatus nervously watching the testers conduct chip tests.

Since IBM launched PersonalComputer on August 12, 81, personal computers have taken North America by storm with a mesmerizing force, and this trend is spreading all over the world.

IBM with its huge influence quickly popularized to people what is called a personal computer, worthy of the blue giant, IBM with its own incomparable brand appeal to instill IBM's PC, PC is IBM's concept, quickly occupied the microcomputer market to expand their standards to the world.

Before the advent of IBM.PC, the microcomputer market was a competition between the best and the best, and the market was chaotic but exciting, and people were happy to buy it.

However, after IBM.PC entered the market, it quickly defeated all competitors, including the technical standards that these companies had painstakingly operated in advance, and gathered countless developers under its command with IBM's huge influence, and no company dared to stop this force!

No other company in the market has the appeal of the Big Blue, not even the marketing genius Steve Jobs, who is said to be leading a team of people to work on his graphical interface system. After IBM entered the PC field, it immediately squeezed many manufacturers in the market out of the altar, such as the ApppleII computer, which had long occupied the sales throne, and with the launch of IBM.PC, its sales share plummeted from 58% to 35%.

Time has entered 82 years, with the huge resources owned by the blue giant firmly firmly solidified its top spot in the personal computer market, but the price of up to $3,000 and the production capacity that cannot meet the market also let some discerning computer manufacturers see the opportunity to make money!

In January, Apple's contemporary, Cammodore, unveiled an ingenious home computer, the Commodore64 computer.

This computer has the same sleek design as Apple's, but what makes it feel even more unusual is that it actually integrates everything into the keyboard. For example, an acoustic tape for storage, a 20KB ROM, and a 64KB RAM.

And the price of this computer is also very low, compared to the $3,000 IBM.PC, the Commodore 64 has a big price advantage, and the company has priced it as low as $595. Obviously, Commodore has positioned itself very accurately, which is to target those who are computer beginners and college students!

In the United States, the seventies and eighties were the era of widespread computer literacy. It was at this time that the baby boom generation grew up after World War II. These people are different from their conservative parents, they are more lively and optimistic, the rapid development of the new society coupled with thriving families, so that many baby boomer parents are willing to let their children know newer knowledge, this is not one or two people but the overall ideology of the society!

The Commodore64 computer meets this need, and the low price point and the traditional features of the computer can be reflected in this computer, which is simply the hit of the "baby boomer" parents. Therefore, as soon as the Commodore64 was launched, many families rushed into the electronics store with their children, vying to buy this entry-level computer.

It should be said that the emergence of the Commodore64 computer has helped many Americans learn computer knowledge, and the emergence of such low-cost computers has also accelerated the speed of computer popularization in the United States. This computer is simply the American version of the "Little Overlord Learning Machine"!

And now the chip developed in the East Star Laboratory is a popular chip developed in response to the "American Xiaobawang Learning Machine".

After all, the Pentium1 chip is a high-end chip with more than 120,000 transistors, which is difficult to manufacture and expensive to manufacture, and the price of the P1 chip is $120, which is not suitable for the low-end market. In order to come up with a cheap chip that can be mass-produced as soon as possible to compete with low-end chips such as 6502 and Z80, Dongxing engineers have made a transformation on the basis of the P1 chip.

The original Pentium1 chip has a clock frequency of 20MHz, while the chip with the cache degradation removed has been tested to clock at 8MHz. Although there is some loss in clock frequency, the manufacturing cost and manufacturing difficulty are greatly reduced. After calculation, such chips can achieve a price of $25 each. It is as cheap as the low-priced chips 6502 and Z80 on the market.

Lin Qiangsheng took the chip and observed, and he said to Cordinan with satisfaction: "Not bad." We also have a cheap microprocessor! ”

From the outside, this chip is obviously rougher than the P1 chip, but its performance is much higher than that of Z80 and 6502. After all, this is a product that cuts performance from a fourth-generation chip, which is more advanced than products like Z80 and 6502, which are themselves low-end chips.

Professor Zhang Xi said to Lin Qiangsheng regretfully: "A good chip has been removed like this, and the performance makes it lame, what is this for?" ”

"Enriching the product line is also what manufacturers should do, chips are not like TVs, electromechanical refrigerators and other products are designed to be difficult to match, manufacturers take out the best products. And the chip is different. This is the underlying technology, and we developers can make whatever product we want to make! I can rely on P1 to develop low-end chips and make single-chip microcomputers, and downstream manufacturers have to listen to our command! Lin Qiangsheng said to Professor Zhang Xi.

Professor Zhang Xi was thoughtful after listening to Lin Qiangsheng's words, and Lin Qiangsheng's statement made him a little confused for a while. When they were in China, their research institutes were usually tasked by their superiors to develop a circuit. They rarely come into contact with the actual product, they provide what the task needs, and they never make their own decisions.

Professor Zhang Xi and other domestic researchers don't know much about the market, but after arriving in the United States, they were shocked by what they saw and heard here. There are so many electronic products in the mall that enrich their horizons and impact their hearts, and all kinds of research and innovation patent inventions also bombard their minds, which is too different from the same life in China!

Lin Qiangsheng carefully put the five packaged processors into the box and packed them, and he took the box out of the chip lab and went straight to another laboratory. Coming to another building, this is the assembly and dispensing center of the Pentium computer, where the new processor will be tested with matching hardware.

Now there are four or five mainframes on the test bench, and the original chips of these mainframes have been removed, and there are Pentium computers and IBM.PCs.

In order to better cater to the market, the Pentium computer is fully compatible with IBM.PC, and IBM has opened up the standard and disclosed most of the technical information, so that anyone and manufacturers can design computer software according to its standards. Although IBM did not expect the consequences of this at first, Lin knew that the personal computer market was about to usher in a frenzy of development. In anticipation, the products of his two computer companies are compatible with IBM.PC, which is the so-called "compatible machine".

The chip is installed, and the main unit is spread out next to the monitor with its internal organs open. Lin Qiangsheng pressed the button, the host made a "biu" sound, the fan first turned up, and then the computer screen also lit up.

The screen first had the Pentium logo in white letters on a black background, and then it entered the DOS system.

This DOS system was bought at a low price from Microsoft, and Bill Gates recommended MS-DOS to Pentium Computer Company with half selling and half giving away. Now Bill Gates has not become a big bull, even if IBM used his DOS to make him some money, but he has not become a leader in the computer industry. At this time, he was still in the very humble pioneering period of his career, and was recommending his low-cost products to various computer companies.

"Haha, it worked!" Lin Qiangsheng clenched his fists happily. It will definitely work, he believed from the beginning that it is very difficult to go from the low end to the high end, but it is very easy to go from the high end to the low end.

Although it has cut most of the performance on the chip, the chip is still able to support existing personal computer technology very well. In fact, the current hardware technology is a bit unable to keep up with the development speed of chips, and most of the computing power on the chip is useless, and ordinary people can't use it at all.

On February 5th, the traditional Chinese New Year, Pentium released a popular home computer to the computer market.

This computer has a DOS system, and compared to a game model like the Commodore64, the Pentium product is undoubtedly more like a computer. It has a state-of-the-art floppy drive system, which comes with 7 floppy disks, a clock clock rate of 8.01MHz, and 128KB of RAM. The computer is also compatible with IBM.PC, so you can use the fastest and most extensive IBM.PC software on the market.

This computer can not only help people learn computer knowledge, it is also fully compatible with IBM.PC, and can use various hardware technologies developed in accordance with IBMPC standards, which provides a good choice for merchants who are accustomed to IBM products!

And the price of this personal computer released by Pentium is quite cheap, it is as cheap as the Commodore64 with a clock rate of 1.023MHz, and Pentium has given it an ultra-low price of $598!

This computer Pentium company gave it a new brand, Celeron Computer. The chip it uses is also named Celeron chip.

This high-quality and inexpensive computer immediately detonated the North American computer market, and what is even more unexpected is that after the product was launched, many consumers who had already ordered Commodore64 computers bought Celeron computers after making some comparisons. (To be continued......)