Chapter 324 Everything is ready
In Nakajima Heitaro's opinion, this was a matter of cutting corners, but Shirakawa Kaede thought it was normal.
The real cutting of corners can only be seen in the various outrageous operations in the future. What I am doing now is already very conscientious.
At least Baichuan Feng thinks that cutting costs is a normal business practice as long as it does not affect basic functions.
Ultimately it's all about making money. You can't make a portable CD player that satisfies everyone but doesn't make any profit at all.
What is the meaning of such a company? Baichuan Feng is very realistic, he just wants to make money.
After looking at the portable CD player, Baichuan Feng finally had some idea in his mind.
It’s enough to produce a physical product that works properly, even if it is a laboratory product, even if it has some minor flaws.
Anyway, when the time comes, I will be the one bragging about my product, and others won’t be able to see what the product is like.
With the product to support the event, Baichuan Feng began to shift his attention to the computer next to him.
“Is this our prototype?”
“Hai, its working principle is similar to that of a CD player, but due to the urgency of the time, all the parts are made individually.
Right now it’s barely usable, but there are still some issues with software and system support.”
Shirakawa Kaede and Nakajima Heitaro gathered around the small black box on the table, looking at it and discussing it non-stop.
This is the optical drive that Baichuan Feng has always wanted to make. At this press conference, he also wants to show off this black technology.
However, the optical drive on the table is just a concept machine. Like the portable CD player, it is a product of laboratory hand-made.
“So what demonstrations can it perform?”
It’s just a concept machine. As long as I can brag about it, that’s enough. Shirakawa Kaede doesn’t have high requirements.
Nakajima Heitaro turned on his computer and stammered, "It's probably just text and a customized picture."
This... seems to be quite different from what I imagined. In Baichuan Feng's impression, a CD could hold anything.
“Junior Brother Baichuan, although we know the working principle of the optical drive very well, the means to achieve it are not difficult to do.
But storage devices, in addition to hardware requirements, also require software and system support.”
As if knowing that Shirakawa Kaede was a little disappointed, Nakajima Heitaro turned on the computer and entered the system, and then struggled for a long time before entering an interface.
"If our optical drive only has hardware but no system recognition and software support, it will be no different from a piece of scrap metal."
Soon, under his operation, a green indicator light on the top of the black CD-ROM drive box on the table lit up, accompanied by the sound of a motor turning.
"Because time was urgent, there was no time to contact Microsoft for system support. We could only ask Fujitsu to modify the underlying logic and force the optical drive to be recognized.
Currently, it can only recognize relatively low-capacity text and specially processed images.
There can’t be more than that. If there are more, the computer will go into a state of shutdown. The operation of the optical drive will also have problems, and even damage the disk surface. "
To put it bluntly, the current use of optical drives has very serious limitations.
This computer has been specially debugged to recognize the optical drive, and the contents of the optical drive have also been specially screened and processed before they can be operated on the computer.
Everything was custom made and extremely unstable.
Despite Nakajima Heitaro's careful operation, the computer screen would occasionally freeze.
It can be seen how crude today's optical drives are, and there is almost no software support.
Baichuan Feng sighed and said, "Okay, it's better to have something than nothing."
"Thank you for your hard work, Senior Brother. I believe you also understand the future of optical drives. It has the potential to become the next flagship product of our Shirakawa Electric. Please take care of it."
"Of course," Nakajima Heitaro nodded. This was his area of expertise.
Moreover, he was personally very motivated at this time. Shirakawa Electric was about to go public, in addition to the original shares purchased internally.
Baichuan Feng also gave him some incentive shares. Although these were virtual shares, there would be some dividends in the future.
Isn't the reason for such preferential treatment because of his contribution to CD technology?
Therefore, Nakajima Heitaro was very concerned about the optical drive at this time. He also knew that this storage technology had a brighter future than floppy disks.
The prospect is money, so he has no choice but to pay attention to it.
Portable CD player and optical drive, these two things are the black technology that Shirakawa Kaede is going to show off at the press conference.
How can you sell stocks and raise the stock price without coming up with some solid evidence?
Everything is for profit, everything is about money.
After going over the products to be announced at the end of the month with Nakajima Heitaro, Shirakawa Kaede went straight to Shima Masayoshi's office.
What to do? To avoid possible problems with their own chips.
"Mr. Dao, there is no similarity between our chips and Intel's products, right?"
The IBM industrial espionage case, which was making headlines at the time, served as a wake-up call to Shirakawa Feng.
When our own chips were first designed, some compilation instructions were universal in order to be compatible with Intel chips.
He is not sure whether this constitutes infringement. If there is a risk, it is still time to adjust now.
If SIC grows big enough in the future and Intel suddenly comes knocking on the door, that will be no joke.
The amount of loss may be in billions of dollars.
"Please rest assured, Mr. Shirakawa, we have developed our own compiler software with our own unique coding and instructions.
Except for the first batch of products used in arcade machines, all subsequent chips have updated the underlying instruction code. "
"That's good~" Baichuan Feng breathed a sigh of relief.
The first batch of arcade machines only shipped tens of thousands of units, and they were all in Japan, so there shouldn't be any problems.
Shima Masayoshi understood why he was so nervous. After all, the IBM case was now .
In the past, people had no concept of software copyright and were prone to directly copying competitors’ designs in some aspects.
The rampant plagiarism in the electronic game industry shows that not only ordinary people but also many corporate entities are not aware of this.
I believe that after this incident, Japanese companies will be more secretive when copying others, at least it will not be obvious at a glance.
But Shima Masayoshi is different. He has been in Silicon Valley for nearly ten years, so how could he not understand the reason?
In order to quickly bring the SIC8089 to market and to facilitate developers, the compilation instructions of the initial SIC8089 were compatible with Intel's design.
However, long before, just after the chip went into mass production, he was developing SIC's own compiler.
The purpose is to replace the previous compatible design as soon as possible and form its own compilation style.
With the huge investment of more than 1 billion from Baichuan Feng, the supporting design of developing software is naturally no problem.
After all, the current chip structure is not that complicated, and starting from scratch does not have as high a threshold as in later generations.
The so-called compiler or compiling software translates high-level code into machine language that the processor can understand, which is similar to an instruction set.
It is compatible with the chip architecture and is a tool that can improve development efficiency.
In fact, Intel does not have high requirements for the confidentiality of the instruction set. After all, the chip architecture is top secret.
However, even a layman like Baichuan Feng knows that the architecture of the chip is its core.
How could this not be taken into consideration when developing SIC's own chips?
Now all of SIC's chips use the new architecture that Professors Masayoshi Shima and Masayoshi Matsumura developed themselves.
This architecture is differentiated from Intel's X86 to the greatest extent possible, with the aim of forming its own processor camp.
Baichuan Feng knew how outrageous Intel's X86 hegemony was in later generations.
Except for a few chip companies that exploited loopholes in the early days, Intel hardly allows any other manufacturers to use its own X86 architecture.
As the processor market continues to expand, the X86 architecture is also being continuously optimized, and its patent barriers are getting higher and higher.
Later, there was almost no other company that broke its monopoly in the terminal processor market.
Therefore, Shirakawa Kaede emphasized to Shima Masayoshi and others from the beginning that they should develop their own chip architecture.
It doesn’t matter if it’s slow, and it doesn’t matter if there are some problems. After adjusting slowly over a long period of time, a qualified chip architecture will eventually be born.
Fortunately, the current chip structure is not complicated, with only tens of thousands of transistors inside, so there is no problem in rebuilding the circuit architecture.
It would be troublesome if hundreds of millions of transistors were integrated together in the future .
In more than two years, SIC has also successfully developed its own chip architecture design, which is named SIC architecture.
Simple and crude, easy to remember and understand.
The development of the SIC architecture was only two years later than Intel's X86, and the gap was not very obvious.
Especially now that Intel's main business focus is still on DRAM chips, the CPU business is still very weak and not taken seriously.
This gives SIC a chance to catch up and also gives SIC time to develop.
Intel is currently having a headache over the decline of its DARM business, and the encirclement of Japanese semiconductor manufacturers has made the pressure on it even heavier.
As for a processor chip that is developing in a shabby way far away in Japan, it has no time to care about it at all.
Our own processor chips are left alone, so we have no time to care about others.
Even the X86 architecture that it developed itself was taken away by other second-party manufacturers for free use.
For example, NEC made a big reference to the V20 produced by Intel8088 and the V30 produced by Intel8086.
A few years later, Intel gave up its DRAM business after being forced to surrender by Japanese manufacturers.
When we go back to developing processor chips, there will definitely be something interesting to watch.
You Japanese manufacturers forced me to give up the DRAM business, and you dared to secretly copy my processor chip architecture? !
Wait for the compensation!
By then, it will be like two enemies meeting each other with great jealousy, and Intel will definitely strike NEC without any hesitation.
This is why SIC invested huge amounts of money and took great pains to develop its own architecture.
It must be said that the chaos in the DRAM market also provided an excellent cover for SIC's development.
At the same time, the closure of the neon market also led to the rapid growth of SIC.
If it were in Europe or the United States, SIC would have attracted attention long ago.
Living in isolation has its advantages. Look, doesn't this protect SIC very well?
The architecture is brand new and patented, and the compiler has long been circumvented to prevent any possible infringement.
After confirming the situation, Baichuan Feng finally felt relieved. After all, the Americans would sue for infringement at every turn, so it was better to be careful.
After sorting out all these things, it is already the end of July and Shirakawa Electric's briefing is about to be held.
At the same time, some news about the progress of the case between Hitachi and IBM was sent back from the United States.
During the July trial, Hitachi's legal team questioned the relationship between IBM and the FBI and whether there was insider trading between the two.
They even asked the inspection authorities to produce documents to prove the relationship between the two and to prove the connection between IBM and Palin, who leaked the information.
Hitachi took this opportunity to file a counterclaim.
We have to say that Hitachi is really tough. Even in this situation, it is unwilling to admit the fact that it sought IBM's confidential information.
Because of Hitachi's disturbance, the trial did not produce any results.
It is foreseeable that this tug-of-war will continue for a long time, but Hitachi's toughness also means that IBM will not go looking for trouble with Fujitsu too early.
In this case, it is time to hold a briefing for Shirakawa Electric.
