Chapter 154: Some long-term plans
Just when Fan Wubing was hesitating and didn't know where to pass the time, good news came from Hangzhou. Fan Wubing and Taiwanese Wang Rongchang built a memory chip production line in Hangzhou, and finally the first batch of products will be offline soon.
Another good news that almost came with it was that the State Council approved the plan of Fan Investment Group and Intel to build a CPU chip packaging factory in Hangzhou, and treated it as the largest investment promotion project in Hangzhou this year, requiring local governments to provide policies and related support.
The Hangzhou Municipal Government was naturally very happy. It turned out that it was thought that such a large project would definitely be settled in Shanghai, but it did not expect that a pie fell from the sky and a few hundred million US dollars of investment hit it. It was really overjoyed. Therefore, it was naturally welcomed by Fan's Investment Group and Intel's factory construction. A leadership group was also set up to cooperate with the factory construction work here.
Fan's Investment Group has built two major projects in Hangzhou in a row, and invisibly became the largest electronics industry project in Hangzhou. Therefore, the importance of Fan's Investment Group was immediately highlighted. The municipal government urgently needs to meet Fan Wubing in order to cooperate with each other and develop better.
In this way, Fan Wubing didn't have to consider other issues. He brought more than a dozen members of the headquarters and a large group of bodyguards, drove more than a dozen cars to form a convoy, and rushed directly to Hangzhou.
Wang Rongchang's nephew Wang Shihan and several leaders of Hangzhou City have been waiting in the factory for a long time. As soon as Fan Wubing's convoy arrived, they immediately came out. After a while of greeting, they arrived at the factory to visit.
The geographical environment in Hangzhou is relatively good, and the climate is not much different from that in Taiwan, but there is one thing that is that coastal cities are always susceptible to typhoons. Therefore, when building a factory, this point was fully considered, and there are many preventive measures around the factory area.
As the direct person in charge of the factory here, Wang Shihan is very familiar with the environment around the factory. After taking everyone to the electric car in the factory, he changed into dustproof clothing, entered the factory's production workshop, and visited the specific worker operations.
The production lines inside the glass partition were distributed in an orderly manner one after another. Countless workers in dustproof clothing were busy on the assembly line. Countless robots automatically grabbed sets of chips, then soldered and packaged them, and integrated them on the substrate.
"Although I have a computer at home, I never knew that a small memory chip would have to go through such a complicated process to produce it." A deputy mayor said with emotion.
The cache size of memory, graphics card, hard disk or optical drive will directly affect the performance of the device. When personal computers were just popular, the memory used was ics in pieces. To make it serve the computer, it must be soldered to the motherboard. However, this also brings problems to later maintenance, because once a certain piece of memory ic is broken, it must be soldered before it can be replaced. Since the ics that are soldered are not easy to remove, and the users do not have welding knowledge, welding requires mastering welding technology, which is also very risky and is too troublesome to repair.
Therefore, the designers launched modular strip memory, with multiple memory blocks integrated on each one, and at the same time, corresponding memory slots are also designed on the motherboard, so that the memory sticks are easy to install and disassemble at will, and memory repair and upgrade are very simple.
However, Fan Wubing believed that the leaders in front of him had used a computer once or twice, but it was a bit difficult to open the cover of the chassis and find where the memory is, where the graphics card is, and where the hard drive is.
Fan Wubing is a witness to the development of memory. He has had a deep impression of it from the 30pin simm memory in the 286 era, the 72pin simm memory in the 486 era, to the edo dram memory in the pentium era, the sdram memory in the PII era, to the ddr memory in the p4 era and later ddr2 memory.
In the decades of computer technology development, memory has been constantly updated in terms of specifications, technology, bus bandwidth, etc., but it is always the same. The purpose of memory development is to increase the bandwidth of memory to meet the rising bandwidth requirements of CPUs and avoid becoming a bottleneck in high-speed CPU computing.
Wang Shihan introduced to everyone, "Our current production line can meet the production capacity of many different types of memory. Currently, the factory's research team has more than 200 people. Relying on existing memory research and development and production technology, as well as the relatively superior human resources in the mainland, it will inevitably occupy a very important proportion in the world memory market."
After seeing it, Fan Wubing said, "We have to develop a memory chip based on the dimm architecture as soon as possible. The sim architecture is almost outdated."
When Wang Shihan heard Fan Wubing say this, he immediately looked at him with admiration. How can ordinary people understand this? It seems that the boss is different, so he said to Fan Wubing, "Currently, there are two major trends in memory technology architecture. One is dominated by Intel and the other is dominated by Amd and other companies. Which one should we focus on?"
Fan Wubing thought about it and it seemed that the chip architecture dominated by Amd finally defeated the chip architecture dominated by Intel in the market and became the mainstream of the market later. So he said to Wang Shihan, "Follow the development of the memory chip technology of Amd Company and keep it consistent with it. On its architecture, we need to go further and faster."
The leaders next to them couldn't understand what Fan Wubing and Wang Shihan were talking about. After the two of them determined their future research direction, one of the leaders said with emotion, "I only saw high technology today. I didn't expect that a small memory stick had such advanced technology."
Fan Wubing smiled and said, "In terms of memory technology, we have mastered the core technology, but this is far from enough. After all, we all rely on other people's technology peripherals. If we talk about high technology, it is indeed a bit too difficult to see."
"It's not that easy to do CPU." Wang Shihan heard what Fan Wubing said and interrupted.
The design of a CPU is completely different from the design of a memory chip. The design of a memory chip is not difficult, mainly to improve the production process. In terms of CPU, the difficulty of casting a chip is not high. The key is to look at the design capabilities. You need to have a global grasp of the entire computer including operating system, compilation, architecture, i/o, etc. to design a high-performance processor.
Just like a company, fixed assets and funds only provide the necessary conditions, and the key lies in management. In general computers, the coordination of operating system and system structure design is particularly important. Some instructions are specially designed for operating systems, especially in terms of system security, storage management, exception processing, etc.
Looking back at the history of China's computer development, until the early 1980s, domestic processor design technology was no worse than others. To this point, it was largely due to incompatible losses, because most of the costs in computers are spent on hardware, but on software.
Designing the instruction system yourself can only make it easy for a while, but being compatible with other mainstream instruction systems is indeed very troublesome. Sometimes you have to modify the data path for a single instruction and add a lot of things. But if it is not compatible with other systems, the products produced have no market. An important reason why domestic processor design fell behind after the 1980s was that it did not have its own manufacturing process, which led to the overall collapse of the processor design team and the loss of personnel.
However, Fan Wubing himself understands that there are still talents in China who can design general-purpose processors. This time he successfully cooperated with Intel and was about to build a new chip packaging factory. This is not a bad thing. As the cooperation deepens, some problems can also be mentioned. The CPU production process problem should be solved. Then only if you have design talents, there is still a lot of potential to put some effort into general-purpose processors.
After all, after the underlying technology is designed, all we need to do is supplement, improve and correct it, and in addition, it depends on the improvement of production technology, which is the so-called improvement of integration.
But I was just talking about cooperation with Intel at this time, and the factory was also choosing a site. I immediately proposed that if I wanted to do it alone, it would be strange if I didn’t get the Intel people out of anger!
Therefore, Fan Wubing could only hide this idea in his heart, thinking that after a year or two, the production technology matured, he would then use Intel to obtain some production equipment and technology, prepare the material foundation, and then talk about this matter.
However, before this, it is necessary to find domestic general-purpose processor design experts and organize a secret design team so that when the technology matures in the future, it will launch its own commercial general-purpose processor. In that case, the application scope will be very large.
After all, general-purpose processors are not only used on computers. They can be used on some smart devices. This market is not smaller than the computer market. In the future, things like smart home appliances need this thing as the basis, and they have a long-term future.
As a result, Fan Wubing looked a little absent-minded. Until everyone visited the factory and went to the hotel for dinner, the leaders in the city found that Fan Wubing was a little distracted.
Chapter completed!