(Today is a special day. Let us not forget our national humiliation and keep our history in mind.)
With its flying saucer design, the CD Walkman has a sci-fi feel that makes people fall in love with it. It weighs only 100g and is extremely light in the hand.
In order to adapt to the running scene, it also has a unique shock-proof design and waterproof design, making it a must-have personal entertainment product for home travel.
In fact, this is only part of Polaris' personal entertainment plan. The other one is the personal handheld game console.
In the previous life, Nintendo released the personal handheld game console Gamebody in 9891. If you are interested in this handheld game console, you can search online. It is simply too ugly to look at. Zhao Yi definitely cannot tolerate his product looking like that.
If you want to do something, you have to make it high-end, and make a product that other companies can't even think of. Just like the CD player, there is no similar product on the market yet, because the technology content is too high. The technical difficulty here mainly lies in several aspects:
The first is the miniaturization of electronic devices. Otherwise, how can they be installed in a space only as big as a palm? They also need to be lightweight. Otherwise, individuals will feel tired when carrying them around frequently, which will reduce customers’ desire to buy.
Polaris Company has developed a series of new technologies in order to make electronic devices miniaturized and lightweight, the most important of which is electronic device patch technology, which makes some electronic devices as thin as cicada wings and "light as a feather". This is officially the Technology makes the CD player only the size of a palm and weighs only 100g.
The second is high-quality music encoding and decoding technology, which is different from the ROM-CD standard technology announced by Polaris Company. It can truly record and restore the original music sound, allowing music lovers to hear the music as if they were actually there. It feels like attending a concert live.
The third is high-density lithium battery technology. Nowadays, many electronic devices still use AA or AA batteries. This kind of disposable battery not only has limited capacity, but also increases the cost of use for consumers, and has serious consequences for the environment. land pollution.
The electronic products of Polaris Company have basically realized the comprehensive lithium battery. For example, the CD Walkman can continue to listen to music for more than 20 hours on a single charge, which is simply a nuclear bomb-level advantage.
The CD Walkman has been on the market for more than a year, and the fact that there is still no similar product on the market illustrates the technical difficulty involved. Will other consumer electronics companies watch as Polaris makes a lot of money
You must know that the price of a CD Walkman has reached 500 US dollars, which is simply ridiculously expensive. The profit inside is much higher than that of the Apple mobile phone in the previous life, but there is nothing they can do. The technology inside is really too high, and they are struggling to imitate it. After more than a year, there is still no progress.
As far as Zhao Yi knows, Sony and Philips are imitating CD Walkmans. They have this confidence because they have a certain foundation in the field of CD technology.
But despite this, there is still not much progress. Take CD music records as an example. There are fundamental differences between ordinary music and high-quality original music. No matter how they learn from it, there is not much progress.
These are all secondary. At worst, the products they make can be sold cheaper and meet the needs of low-end consumers, but their progress in the miniaturization of electronic devices has been unable to break through.
Occasionally, they came up with a good idea, but it was patented by Polaris Company. No matter how much they clashed over technology, they were unable to break through Polaris Company's patent network.
Now their CD Walkman project is in a state of limbo. Philips has considered giving up the attempt in this area. There is really no hope of a breakthrough.
Philip's approach is relatively pragmatic and does not hang on a tree, but Sony is convinced and is still increasing its research and development efforts, as if it will not give up until this bone is broken.
To be honest, Zhao Yi is not optimistic about Sony's behavior, because Polaris has covered the patent network in all directions of the CD Walkman project. This is a useless and no-opportunity move. In the end, it ended up A fruitless endeavor.
In the past, Sony was able to rely on other businesses to support itself. Now, their home appliances have begun to be attacked by Polaris products, and their global market share is much lower than before.
Maybe they saw that the home appliance industry was facing fierce competition from Polaris, so they needed a place to make breakthroughs in an attempt to restore the company's decline. That's why they were so persistent in investing in the CD Walkman project, hoping to recreate the glory of Walkman. .
Zhao Yi could only say to the people at Sony in his heart, your heads are really strong.
Another important component of the personal entertainment plan is the personal handheld game console. The main idea is still Sony's handheld game console PSP in the previous life. However, Sony's PSP in the previous life did not go on sale until 2004, which is still 21 years away from now.
It can be seen that the technical difficulty of realizing a product that took more than 20 years to be realized in this era can be imagined. However, if you just create a product like Gameboy, it is really meaningless, and it cannot take advantage of Polaris' existing products. Advantage.
Now that Polaris has the most advanced LCD screen, the most advanced CD technology, and a complete set of electronic device miniaturization technology through the CD Walkman project, there is no reason not to develop a cross-generational personal handheld game console.
Since the key components of personal handheld game consoles are high-performance GPUs and high-performance CPUs, this requires semiconductor companies to make breakthroughs in this area. The performance requirements of GPUs even far exceed the current demand for GPUs in personal computers.
The CPU of personal handheld game consoles is also different from that of personal computers. It is more professional and does not require too many useless functions. For this reason, Zhao Yi also gave the semiconductor company a streamlined instruction set, named Cangjie Second Generation Instruction Set.
This reduced instruction set is a subset of the Cangjie first-generation instruction set. Under normal functions, the two sets of instruction sets are compatible with each other. However, the Cangjie second-generation reduced instruction set has more complicated operating efficiency than the Cangjie first generation in an environment that does not require complex calculations. The instruction set is much more efficient, and the computing speed is increased by more than three times with the same number of transistors.
Of course, just improving by three times will not achieve the effects of future generations, so we need to innovate in the chip architecture. This not only improves the chip manufacturing process, but also requires innovation in the internal structure of the chip. This aspect is more difficult than creating a new instruction. The collection is even more difficult, and they have never been able to make a breakthrough in this area.
With no other choice, they still shamelessly approached Zhao Yi, hoping that he could provide technical support. Who suggested that such a perverted request was made by Zhao Yi? Of course, if you have difficulties, you can also approach him, at least from the semiconductor company. Think so.
In the hearts of chip design engineers at semiconductor companies, Zhao Yi is simply a god-like being. What a rebellious fairy boy, he is nothing but scum compared to Zhao Yi.
It is the information related to chip design that Zhao Yi left behind when the semiconductor company was founded. They still cannot say that they fully understand it. Every time they read it again, they always gain new insights. It is simply owned by the semiconductor company. Engineers' treasure trove of knowledge is now more strictly managed than before in order to prevent this information from leaking out.
These technical information are really too important, comparable to the Nine Yin Manual in Jin Yong's martial arts novels. From these information, many technical points can be found, each of which may lead to a revolutionary improvement in the chip.
This time, I really couldn't find any breakthrough technology from these materials, so I "shamelessly" asked Zhao Yi for advice.
Zhao Yi was not impatient. After all, the plan was proposed by himself and the performance parameters were also required by himself, so he would be more or less responsible for the results.
Besides, these difficulties were not difficult for him. It only took him one day to sort out the technical information and then gave it to the semiconductor company for them to study on their own.
To be honest, most of the day is spent inputting the data in the brain into the computer, which can be said to be a physical job.
The CPU has solved it, but the GPU has the same difficulty. The current purpose of the GPU is to generate a large number of triangles from the picture, and to form an image through tens of millions of triangles.
In other words, the GPU is actually repeatedly generating triangles, coloring each triangle through positioning instructions, and then splicing them into a picture.
If you enlarge the images generated by the GPU, you will find that they are all made of triangles. The purpose of this is to simplify the instructions of the GPU. The simpler the instructions, the higher the efficiency of execution.
The number of triangles the GPU needs to generate is announced by the CPU. Even which triangle renders what color and how to render the color are also determined by the CPU. The GPU is an unconscious "tool man".
In this case, to improve the performance of the GPU, we can only start from the number of transistors and manufacturing process, which means that it can only be solved by increasing the number of computing units of the GPU.
Such a simple and crude method cannot be realized now due to process limitations. Zhao Yi has no intention of raising the process too high at once, otherwise there will be no way to play it later.
If the process can be reduced to a few nanometers in four or five years, Moore's Theorem will become invalid later. To continue to make breakthroughs, we need to start with chip materials. This is too troublesome and is not conducive to the sustainable development of the industry.
What Zhao Yi needs is to develop slowly, as long as he is one generation ahead of his opponents. Walking the dog slowly can not only maintain his own advantages, but also prevent his opponents from jumping over the wall, allowing them to see the hope of winning and some leftovers. Leave them alone.
Since we can't start from the manufacturing process, we can only start from the algorithm. Generating a large number of triangles within a certain period of time seems to Zhao Yi to be too simple and crude, and can even be said to be rude.
So he decided to write a new set of GPU algorithms to achieve a certain level of intelligence, which could generate changing polygons and blur rendering, greatly saving computing resources.
It is useless to just implement this algorithm on the GPU. The supporting algorithm also needs to be implemented on the CPU. After all, the specific instructions are still issued by the CPU. The CPU must understand how it should issue the instructions, so the instructions were streamlined in the original second-generation Cangjie. On the basis of the set, some algorithms have been modified, and it can be regarded as a game-specific CPU chip. (End of chapter)