CPU entrepreneurial wind appears, entrepreneurs detailed opportunities and challenges

Jiangyue Shanghai, a reporter from Southern Finance and Economics, reported the CPU design, which is a "wind outlet" with a high risk and profit. Recently, as the first domestic CPU company Longxin Zhongke successfully landed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange Science and Technology Board on June 24, the CPU design attracted a lot of attention.

This industry has strong monopoly, high technical barriers, and an experienced giant player. However, at the same time, the consumption of mobile phones, computers, and servers has increased day by day, and it is still promoting CPU output value to continue to rise.

In the second half of 2021, several CPU entrepreneurial teams appeared in the market at the same time. Why choose to enter the "track" at this moment? There are many curiosity inside and outside the industry.

One of the entrepreneurial teams established this core technology, which is headquartered in Shanghai Lingang New Area. Since its establishment half a year, the company has completed multiple rounds of financing, and has finalized a group of business partners to focus on the personal computer, tablet, smart connected car and cloud computing CPU.

In an exclusive interview with the general manager of this core technology, Ren Qingyuan said in an exclusive interview with all media reporters in Southern Finance and Economics that the global CPU industry has emerged with a new round of hardware and software technology subversion, forming a "wind outlet" for entrepreneurship. He also believes that the CPU entrepreneurship cannot be separated from ecology, and the upstream and downstream of the chip needs to work together.

Technological changes bring entrepreneurial opportunities

Over the past few decades, global chip practitioners have launched countless fierce competition around the CPU, and eventually formed a "winner to eat" pattern. Where does the opportunity stem in the eyes of entrepreneurs?

Ren Qingyuan introduced to reporters that when the market believes in individual technologies, the industry pattern is indestructible, but global technological progress in recent years is bringing subversive changes.

The full CPU is called Central Processing Unit, which is the "central processor". For many years, the CPU has been used in a large number of computers and mobile phones, forming individual strong giant players.

Among them, Intel is located in the "industry overlord". In the computer CPU market, Intel has occupied about 80%of the market share.

"Pentium was born, and quickly occupied the entire market, and also quickly defeated the X86 architecture to quickly defeat other architectures." Ren Qingyuan explained that the instruction setting structure has shown an important position of "watershed" in the 1990s.

The instruction set architecture is also called a computer architecture, which is the structure abstraction between software and hardware. The instruction sets recognized by the market include Alpha, ARM, MIPS, Power, RISC-V, X86, etc., but in the more than 20 years in the 1990s, the X86 architecture brought a higher performance and user experience, which received more. Market favor.

"It is the needs of consumers to drive this industry forward." Ren Qingyuan said. Consumers continue to put forward faster and better demands for electronic products, and drive the inventor of the supply market and manufacturers to compete for technological upgrades.

However, there are constant "newcomers" in the market to challenge Intel's authority. In 2007, the first iPhone came out, leading the ARM architecture to defeat X86 on the CPU of the mobile phone. Nowadays, more than 90%of the world's mobile phone CPUs are designed based on the ARM architecture.

At the same time, the "cloud service" has quietly spread, becoming a "big infrastructure" project of the global digital economy. Server and refrigeration systems and power distribution systems have become the three leading areas of "Yunji Construction", and X86 and ARM have also launched fierce competition for the server market.

Subsequently, the ARM architecture was penetrated on the computer, and it was about to subvert the hegemon of X86 for about 30 years.

"In recent years, the ARM architecture has been repeatedly verified on the server and computer. Compared with the X86 architecture, it has obvious technical advantages." Ren Qingyuan said that the computer and server under the ARM architecture not only maintain high performance, but also maintain low energy, but also maintain low energy. Consumption. In other words, consumers will use computers with stronger battery life, while corporate companies can use lower -cost cloud services.

Based on the recognition of the above technology, this core technology plan is based on the ARM architecture to expand to three types of businesses, including desktop (computers) CPU, PAD (tablet) CPU, and the computing module of connected cars and cloud computing array servers. Essence

According to Ren Qingyuan, the company's team has full competitive advantages in terms of the technical aspects of the above scene. The company's founder team mainly comes from the world -renowned computer CPU design leading company. The end -to -end R & D team has in -depth docking of key global customers and completed the definition, design and mass production delivery of a number of industry -leading smart CPU chips; CTO Liu Fang was the chief SoC architect of Meta (Facebook), AMD's SOC architect, and Apple core architecture Division is responsible for developing the architecture design of Apple 6th -generation CPU, 2nd generation GPU, and 2nd generation SOC.

Promote the industry's ecological construction

Represented by this core technology, several teams are promoting the technological breakthrough and market construction of domestic CPUs. Can domestic CPU companies realize the "CPU autonomy" dream? From this point of view, the construction of terminal manufacturer channels and software ecology is the key to the success of the CPU field.

"First of all, we must grasp the terminal scene." Ren Qingyuan thought. "The most closely related link in the industrial chain is downstream customers, and the scenes need to be performed first." Ren Qingyuan pointed out that this core technology is interested in selling products for many computers, server manufacturers, and automotive production and developers. Industry contact. He said that the customer goal is not limited to Chinese electronic equipment manufacturers, but aimed at the global market.

At present, this core technology is promoting the development of the first generation of products, and it is expected to achieve product delivery in 2023. "Chip development is a long process." Ren Qingyuan said.

Secondly, the implementation of the CPU hardware requires the cooperation of the operating system, and the software ecology needs to be built for a long time. "We are linking with the operator of the operating system. I hope that it is a system -level solution to be delivered to the customer." Ren Qingyuan said.

In fact, the "alliance" with the operating system is also one of Intel's successful means. At the time, Intel and the desktop operating system developer Microsoft formed the "Wintel" alliance. Microsoft upgraded the Windows system again and again, which also prompted consumers to buy a computer of the new X86 processor.

For domestic CPU manufacturers, forming a "Wintel" alliance is obviously a huge challenge. Ren Qingyuan pointed out that software developers also want to improve product utilization, rather than just investing in R & D investment for a certain hardware. To this end, this core technology will continue to link with other chip hardware developers to promote more participants in the industry to use new platforms.

It is worth noting that the software ecology promoted by this core technology is an ARM -based software ecology. Talking about "CPU autonomy", many people in the market believe that the independent structure comparable to ARM is the first step in the domestic CPU, hoping to promote the software and hardware alliance of "domestic architecture+domestic operating system".

Regarding the above problems, Ren Qingyuan believes that domestic CPUs can work for different markets. "We are facing the global consumer market. When choosing a structure, the first consideration is whether consumers pay for it." He said that first of all, we must find the landing of the product and take the original accumulation before considering starting into other markets.

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