game trailblazer

Chapter 217 Integrate Main Board Listing
One day in mid-March, Zhao Zha suddenly ran into Zhang Lexing's office in a panic, and before he could catch his breath, he hurriedly said, "Boss, the integrated motherboard at the Institute of Microelectronics 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 finalization of the integrated motherboard chipset, and then it can enter the production process." Zhao Jai said excitedly.

Zhang Lexing rubbed his hands happily. At the beginning, he wanted to promote the development of integrated motherboards, in order to speed up the improvement of computer performance. Regardless of whether the development of Intel and AMD processors can be accelerated, at least it can speed up the image processing. If it is, there will be relatively fewer restrictions when developing games, at least the time when PCs are ridiculed by game console players as stupid and clumsy will be shorter.

When 3DFX's VooDoo generation graphics card appeared, it once brought such hope to computer players, but unfortunately the price of VooDoo graphics card is not acceptable to most people.Zhang Lexing's idea is to use the integrated graphics card as a breakthrough, start with the 2D and 3D performance of the graphics card, and speed up the improvement of the graphics processing capability of the PC. Once the performance of the integrated graphics card reaches or approaches the performance of the mainstream graphics card, the corresponding price of the integrated motherboard If it is more affordable, then the popularity of this platform will definitely be very high, and it will also make the PC using this integrated motherboard a better game platform.

Now that his company's integrated motherboard has been successfully developed, Zhang Lexing can't wait any longer. He wants to see for himself what the integrated motherboard's chipset looks like and what kind of performance it has.

"Zhao Jiao, ask someone to get the car ready, I want to go and have a look now." Zhang Lexing calmed down his excitement, and confessed to Zhao Jaw.

"Okay boss, please wait a moment." Zhao Jai nodded, turned and left Zhang Lexing's office.

……

After getting the car ready, Zhang Lexing and Ma Guanghai came to the parking lot, got into the Mercedes-Benz S600, and Zhao Zhu also got into the car.Then the three commercial vehicles full of bodyguards acted as the leader, the Mercedes-Benz S600 was in the middle, and the other three commercial vehicles served as the rear guard.The reason for such a big battle is also because of the accident that happened last year. Although Chu Jing has calmed down the incident, it has brought great excitement to Andatai Security Company. In addition, the same happened last year to Li Zeju In the case of the kidnapping, Andatai Security Company never dared to be careless again, and always maintained the highest level of security measures. Except for the six accompanying vehicles, there were people protecting key nodes along the way. In short, the same thing cannot happen again and again. Three of them happened.

The convoy drove into the Dongfang Microelectronics Research Institute safely, and had a few words of courtesy with Vice President Ye who came to greet him. Then, under his leadership, Zhang Lexing and his party came to the conference room of the research institute.There are already several people waiting in the meeting room, one of them is Tang Wenyuan who introduced the verification integrated motherboard last year, it seems that Zhao Jaw has already contacted him before coming.

Vice President Ye followed into the meeting room. He noticed Zhang Lexing's puzzled eyes, and first introduced Tang Wenyuan: "Mr. Zhang, I think you should still have an impression of him. He is Tang Wenyuan, the chief researcher of the integrated motherboard research group. The three next to him are Dr. Wang Changli from Innovation Company, Dr. Bill Daly from Nvidia (NVIDIA) and Dr. Uni Koenig from ATI. In the research and development of the display core and audio processing chip, the team led by the three of them has made great efforts..."

Following Vice President Ye's introduction, Zhang Lexing reached out to shake the hands of these R&D personnel one by one, and said a few words of encouragement to increase the distance between the two parties.

After Vice President Ye finished his introduction, everyone took their seats and gathered around the oval table in the conference room. Tang Wenyuan also turned on the computer and projector, called up a PPT file, and started his research on the integration of the motherboard chipset. introduce.

"Mr. Zhang, our main achievement this time is the motherboard chipset composed of South Bridge and North Bridge chips. The design code of the South Bridge is '212', and the design code of the North Bridge is '311'. The South Bridge chip focuses on functionality. , mainly including the control of PCI bus and keyboard and mouse interface, etc., and integrates sound card and network card. The north bridge chip focuses on communication management, mainly including four memory controllers, graphics interface controllers, front-side bus controllers, and north-south bridge bus controllers. It is composed of two logics and integrates our newly designed high-performance display core AN128S, which was jointly developed by the team of Bill Daly and Dr. Uni Koenig. The simplified version of the AN128 graphics card released, in order to give full play to its performance, uses the AGP interface released by Intel last year..."

Zhang Lexing remembers that the last time he looked at the verified integrated motherboard, the motherboard still used the 3DRage chip logic provided by ATI. Unexpectedly, such a big change has occurred in just over a year, and it has actually become Nvidia (NVIDIA) and ATI (阿天) company jointly developed, it seems that 3DFX company has brought too much pressure to these two companies.

Zhang Lexing's guess is correct. 1996 was a bumper year for 3DFX. Not only the VooDoo generation sub-cards it launched won the favor of many graphics card manufacturers, but also the "Tomb Raider" that supported VooDoo graphics cards at the E3 exhibition "was an instant hit, and VooDoo graphics cards became the new favorite of players. In addition, the global storage price plummeted, resulting in a sharp drop in the production cost of VooDoo graphics cards. For a while, VooDoo graphics cards became a hot commodity, and 3DFX made persistent efforts to launch VoodooRUSH. , which is a graphics card that includes both 2D and 3D processing capabilities.

However, Nvidia (NVIDIA) and ATI (Yetian) did not go well during this period. In 95, Nvidia finally spent two years tinkering with an NV1. Although the performance was not bad, but later with the establishment of the Direct3D standard And GLIDE (special for VooDoo graphics cards) became popular, and NV1 became a thing that no one cares about. Nvidia suffered huge losses because of this, and even the research and development costs of NV1 could not be fully recovered.In order to develop a graphics card compatible with Direct3D, Nvidia had to lay off employees. Later, thanks to Zhang Lexing's investment, Nvidia was pulled back from the edge of the cliff. The situation of ATI is slightly better. After all, it is an established company. However, the 3DRage display core with high expectations encountered a fatal compatibility problem as soon as it was launched. Later, it barely regained some market by relying on the improved chip 3DRageII.However, for these two companies, 3DFX, which was originally inconspicuous, has rapidly grown into a huge threat. Nvidia and ATI have finally come together and plan to jointly develop a product that completely defeats 3DFX, code-named "AN128". , so there is a simplified version of the core AN128S on the integrated motherboard.

Tang Wenyuan gestured on the projection screen with the pointing pen in his hand, and continued to introduce the performance of the integrated motherboard chipset: "...The AN128S core uses the AGP2x interface, which has a data transmission bandwidth of up to 533MB/s and a fill rate of up to 100Mpixel. /s, with a hardware triangle generation engine, capable of generating 500 million triangles per second...Integrated MPEG-2 dedicated decoding chip, supports DVD hardware decoding, has high-speed DVD playback function...The sound card part adopts the improved company The SoundBlasterAWE32 chip logic has almost the same functions as the SoundBlasterAWE32 sound card, and a hardware wavetable daughter card can be added through the 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-adaptive, the dedicated ASIC chip optimizes the data transmission between the network interface and the PCI bus. Compared with the original Hess-100 chip, it greatly reduces the CPU usage during network communication and improves Improve the efficiency of data exchange..."

After placing the PPT files 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 hadn't appeared in the days he had experienced, and couldn't help feeling overwhelmed and filled with emotion.The motherboard in front of me is an engineering model, 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 looking at the motherboard in his hand several times, Zhang Lexing put it down and asked Tang Wenyuan, "Is the production cost of this chipset high?"

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

Tang Wenyuan seemed to have made preparations in this regard before, and replied directly: "Mr. Zhang, we have conducted an evaluation on this aspect. If our chipset is used to produce motherboards, the price will be 22.5% lower than the current mainstream products. In terms of performance, it can be improved by about 45%..."

After listening to Tang Wenyuan's introduction, Zhang Lexing nodded in satisfaction. This chipset looks quite competitive and should be able to achieve his goal.Now that the product is ready, it is time to consider how to promote it. In fact, if Zhang Lexing intends to let his own company produce motherboards, it is also possible, but this is tantamount to pushing other motherboard manufacturers to the opposite side, just like the acquisition of STB by 3DFX. It's the same as the stupid move made by the graphics card factory.Of course, Zhang Lexing would not do this kind of stupid thing. In his opinion, to promote this kind of chipset, a better way is to learn from MIPS, only do research and development instead of direct production, and increase willingness to produce through lower licensing fees. one's business Patner.

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

At the beginning of April, Orient Chip Technology Co., Ltd. held a grand new product conference in Hong Kong, officially launched the epoch-making chipset EC4, and demonstrated engineering samples and computers assembled with it on the spot.Representatives from the VisualSystem Group, as well as representatives from the world's top motherboard manufacturers such as ASUS, MSI, and Gigabyte attended the meeting. Intel also sent representatives to congratulate them because the EC6500 only supports their processors. .Many computer manufacturers have seen the potential of EC6500 from this press conference, and more importantly, its relatively affordable production cost has attracted their attention, and they began to pay attention to the follow-up development of EC6500.

After the press conference, motherboard manufacturers such as Asustek, MSI, and Gigabyte also announced that they will produce corresponding motherboards based on the EC6500 series chipset. Let yourself fall behind.Under the joint operation of Dongfang Industrial Group and VisualSystem Group, news of the EC6500 chipset began to appear frequently in major computer media, and EC6500 even appeared in some outdoor advertisements.

Under the bombardment of complex information, EC6500 has become the most popular term, and it has also become the latest spoken language of many computer enthusiasts. Many companies have also become 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 enthusiasts, most people still hope to do more with less.

Of course, there are also side effects. Because EC6500 is so popular, many users who are tempted by its performance and price are waiting and waiting, looking forward to the launch of motherboards using EC6500 chipsets, and looking forward to the shelves of computers using EC6500 chipsets motherboards. As a result, For three months, computer sales fell sharply, until ASUS KN6508 motherboard with EC97 chipset went on the market, and the unsalable computer situation eased.

(End of this chapter)