Chapter 728: The Strong will always be Strong
Translator: _Min_ Editor: Caron_
Jiang Chen originally intended to directly buy the two studios, but there was a minor incident during the acquisition process.
There was no problem with Maxis since EA was only second to Microsoft, the studio killer. The giant Maxis series studios were cut countless times, and Future Technology was more than willing to acquire the studios just as they were ready to swing their knives. They were happy with the deal and sold Maxis Studio at a premium of 20 million US Dollar.
Rockstar was a bit more difficult.
The parent company of Rockstar was Take Two, and its operation wasin good condition. GTA VI: Return to Liberty City, which launched in June 2017, continued the glory of GTA V and expanded the map from California to New York and included one European city. The map more than doubled in size compared to the previous game. GTA VI easily reached sales volumes of 40 million copies across all platforms.
Take Two, of course, wouldn’t be that foolish to sell their cash cow.
That being the case, Future Technology had to take a step back and start headhunting people.
The international headhunting company hired by Jiang Chen provided him with a list of 27 names with skills in planning, script-writing, which included the chief designer of Rockstar Studio, in addition to their personal information, incomes, and debts. After obtaining the list, Jiang Chen took out his checkbook and gave their monthly salary a 50% boost then the headhunters took the list back and headhunted using this standard.
Jiang Chen gave Ning Huajian the responsibility of establis.h.i.+ng the VRcity project team. He was an expert in this regard. Although Jiang Chen was a frontrunner in virtual reality technology, he definitely wasn’t as knowledgeable of the market as the CEO who had worked from the ground up.
After handling those tasks, Jiang Chen noticed it was still early, so he took a trip to the Material Science Laboratory and examined their progress.
After resolving the graphene-related challenges, the Materials Science Laboratory recently recruited a group of scientists and set up two new project departments to study the application of graphene cables and graphene chips.
The former was aimed at s.p.a.ce elevators, while the latter was aimed at the electronics industry of Future Heavy Industrial.
Some time ago, the new Top 500 list of supercomputers was revealed at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Frankfurt, Germany. “Tianhe No.3,” developed as part of the National Key Project and the National Parallel Computer Engineering Technology Research Center, claimed the top of the Top 500 list once again after “Sunway TaihuLight.”
Unlike previous years, using the Dragon Calvary X1 type supercomputer chip, Hua not only won but also cleared out the top five! The news made Hua Computer Engineering Technology Research Center ecstatic and they quickly added 100,000 to their monthly order to increase monthly imports to 200,000 chips.
Based on this trend, it wouldn’t be long until they eclipsed the rest of the world!
Hua’s dominance of the supercomputer market also terrified UA. Although Intel also introduced new super chips based on graphene materials, the gap was still more than just a minor difference compared to the Dragon Calvary X1.
In desperation, although it was committed to fostering local manufacturers such as Intel and Qualcomm, the UA Department of Defense selectively purchased 50,000 supercomputer chips to upgrade the performance of the Department of Defense supercomputers. However, the deal didn’t go through in the end because Future Group refused to fully disclose the technical details of the lix architecture. This was an unacceptable security risk to the Capital.
Unless Future Heavy Industries was a domestic company, they would’t feel rea.s.sured.
However, those private super-computing centers didn’t have so many concerns. In the market, the survival of the fittest was reflected to the extreme. For example, after seeing the powerful features of the Dragon Calvary X1 chip, Google immediately sent out an order of 60,000 chips per month to upgrade its servers.
After seeing the strength of Future Heavy Industrial in the field of chip manufacturing, Google simply gave up its plan to enter the chip manufacturing industry.
Businessmen strove for profitability.
Google used more than 300,000 chips per quarter. If the Dragon Calvary X1 was used, the company would be able to reduce the number of servers by at least 10% while meeting current business demands. While Future Heavy Industrial quoted a wholesale price of 347 USD per chip, this equated to 60.82 million per month for 60,000 chips. However, from an overall cost perspective, the choice of the Dragon Calvary X1 could save them at least 200 million annually.
They lost the motivation to develop their own chips.
Not only Google, but Hewlett-Packard and Dell, which accounted for the nation’s top server chip purchase customers in the UA, also had a strong interest in the Dragon Calvary X1.
At present, the monthly s.h.i.+pments of the Dragon Calvary X1 supercomputing chip reached the incredible figure of 500,000; 200,000 of which flowed into Hua and 100,000 flowed to supercomputers in small countries such as Switzerland and in Europe. The remaining 200,000 were destined for UA.
…
In the foreseeable future, the battle to get onto the Top 500 list of the Frankfurt International Supercomputing Conference would be extremely tragic. Whoever used the Dragon Calvary would be able to dominate the list. If the top ten computers on the list were all equipped with the chip, there would be a compet.i.tion between who possessed more chips and who used them more skillfully.
Unless Celestial Trade’s quantum computer was made public, it would be difficult to end this conflict.
Based on the fact that the major supercomputing centers were extremely close, graphene development involved working on the development of the X2 chip and using it to bring in money.
Do you want to become stronger? Do you want to fire up your national pride? Come and buy Dragon Calvary X2…
Jiang Chen had already imaged what the ads would look like.
…
Future Heavy Industries completed the registration of the lix architecture in various countries and registered patents for each instruction set. After receiving the news, Loongson immediately came to him to obtain authorization for the lix architecture. They were ready to start developing their own superchip based on the lix architecture.
This was agreed upon when the chip was first sold, so Jiang Chen agreed without a second thought. The global price of patent fees was standardized – chips that used lix architecture would pay 10% of the selling price as a patent fee. Although this figure was twice as high as Qualcomm’s 5%, Qualcomm’s pricing was based on the total price of electronics, where Future Technology only conscientiously charged based on the price of a single chip.
However, Jiang Chen noticed that Mr. Wu Weiwen, president of Loongson who came to sign the patent agreement, wasn’t particularly happy.
“Are there any problems, Mr. Wu?” Jiang Chen asked happily.
Wu Weiwen shook his head.
“No problem at all. I just think Mr. Jiang is especially crafty.”
“I don’t quite understand what you mean. Can you explain it to me?” Jiang Chen laughed.
Wu Weiwen smiled and didn’t speak further. He walked away with the lix architecture licensing agreement.
Jiang Chen noticed he seemed to have aged instantly.
Loongson was a state-owned enterprise and enjoyed financial subsidies in business operations. Theoretically, Wu Wenwei, the president, didn’t need to worry about their financial performance. Even if he couldn’t sell a chip in a year or two, the company would absolutely not worry about going bankrupt.
Frankly speaking, when Jiang Chen agreed and authorized him to use the lix structure with Loongson, Wu Wenwei could clearly sense his superiors’ emphasis on Loongson.
However, when the first batch of Dragon Calvary X1 was sent to the supercomputing centers and the scientists at the Supercomputing Center shouted with joy, Wu Wenwei could clearly sense that the eyes of the superiors standing beside him suddenly s.h.i.+fted.
Especially after making the top 5 of the supercomputer list.
The leaders responsible for the National Key Project were almost collectively promoted. The project leader even received praise from the chairman.
This was a great achievement!
Whether it was the individual, the country, or the ethnicity.
Because of this achievemnet, they couldn’t stop.
Sure enough, just as Wu Weiwen expected, the leader responsible for the supercomputing project contacted Future Heavy Industrial immediately after receiving the award and increased the number of purchasing orders. Technology was like a drug – once they started, they couldn’t stop.
Did you get on the top five this year and would you be willing to lose your place next year? Do you still want to have a career?
What should they do if they didn’t want to lose?
They could only buy Dragon Calvary X1. How long did they have to wait before the old scholars came up with research results?
On the dinner table, a sentence from the top leader made Wu Weiwen deeply distressed.
“You can’t always follow protectionism. With no market, where’s the compet.i.tion? Future Group is a child who walked out of our country. Rather than attempting to fill this bottomless hole, it’s better to obtain their technology. Aren’t we a family after all?”
A dangerous thought.
Very dangerous.
However, Wu Wenwei was also clear that as a president of a state-owned enterprise, he simply couldn’t change this.
Nothing could be done to solve the problem, but some things just couldn’t be solved with money.
Unless he could beat the Dragon Calvary X1 and come up with the world’s most powerful super chip…
But was this possible?
Future Heavy Industrial already occupied the high ground of the market and had become the standard chip maker. With its technical advantages, it would take over most of the orders. With the proceeds from these orders, they would continue to invest in these R&D projects, and their technology would only become more powerful and unreachable.
By that time, even Intel and ARM would have to learn from the instruction set of lix architecture to enrich their X86 architecture and ARM architecture and pay royalties to Future Technology, who owned the intellectual property rights.
The powerful would become more powerful. That was the market.
Before the existence of disruptive products, the giants who already occupied the high points would never stumble. It was foreseeable that even if he now obtained authorization of the lix architecture, they would absolutely depend on the chips from Future Group for the next ten years at least.