Chapter 59 Architecture (Ch 826509916)

“Isn’t it a bit inappropriate to adopt the ‘choose one of two’ approach for a small company like Huateng Microelectronics?” An executive carefully raised his doubts.
In his opinion, as a giant in the global screen panel industry, Sanxin’s use of such a targeted strategy against a Chinese company that has just started out seems a bit over the top.
What’s more, implementing the “choose one of two” strategy means that Sanxin must make concessions on screen prices to stabilize the hearts of its partners.
This kind of profit-sharing behavior is undoubtedly a loss of profit for Sanxin.
“Hmph! A small company? Did you know that Huateng Microelectronics is already able to independently mass-produce flexible OLED screens! Can such a company still be considered a small company?” Li Zaiming sneered with a hint of sarcasm in his tone.
He swept his eyes over the executives present and continued, “We must nip any threat in the bud and never let it pose any threat to us Sanxin!”
Li Zaiming’s attitude was very firm. In his view, the rise of Huateng Microelectronics had posed a substantial threat to Sanxin.
If timely action is not taken, the future may be even more difficult to control.
Seeing that Li Zaiming had made up his mind, the executives did not dare to say anything more and could only follow his instructions.
At the same time, Chen Tong, who was far away in China, did not realize that a crisis against Huateng Microelectronics was quietly approaching.
At this moment, he was participating in ARM’s remote meeting via video conferencing.
Compared with TSMC’s distant and cold attitude, ARM, far away in Europe, was much more polite to Chen Tong.
This is not only because Chen Tong is one of the shareholders of ARM, but also because there is huge potential for cooperation between Huateng Semiconductor and ARM.
Finally, after half a month of consultation and negotiation, Huateng Semiconductor finally obtained the authorization for a number of technical patents including ARM instruction set and Austin microarchitecture.
Among them, the authorization period for the instruction set is ten years, and the authorization period for other patents is six years.
Among these patents, the ARM instruction set is undoubtedly the most critical. The instruction set is one of the core technologies of the processor chip, and almost all system tasks need to rely on the instruction set to complete.
Without the authorization of the ARM instruction set, the mobile processor chips designed by Huateng Semiconductor will be difficult to adapt to the Android system.
Of course, if Huateng Semiconductor wants to completely get rid of its dependence on the ARM instruction set, it must independently develop processor chips, operating systems and programming languages ​​to form a complete closed loop.
However, with Huateng Semiconductor’s current technological strength, this is obviously an unattainable goal.
Therefore, in the short term, Huateng Semiconductor still needs to rely on ARM’s technology licensing to ensure the company’s development in the next few years.
In addition to instruction sets, CPU and GPU architecture licensing is also a focus of Huateng Semiconductor.
At present, Huateng Semiconductor does not have the ability to independently develop CPU and GPU architecture, so it must design chips by purchasing licenses.
If the design of mobile processor chips is compared to cooking, then the architecture license provided by ARM is the unprocessed ingredients.
How to cook these ingredients into delicious dishes depends on the technical level of chip design manufacturers.
Currently, the latest architectures released by ARM are A75 and Mali G75.
However, the performance improvements of these two architectures are not significant, resulting in not many mobile processor chips using them.
In contrast, the current A73 architecture is still one of ARM’s most popular architectures.
For example, the CPU architecture used by the current mainstream mobile processor chip, the Snapdragon 835, is modified based on the A73 architecture.
According to historical development, the CPU architecture of the next-generation Fire Dragon 845 will still use the A73 architecture.
After careful consideration, Chen Tong did not plan to let Huateng Semiconductor design chips based on the A75 architecture.
In his opinion, the performance of the A75 architecture can no longer meet the market demand in the next two years.
Therefore, Chen Tong decided to wait for ARM to release the A76 architecture next year.
In Chen Tong’s memory, the A76 architecture was a groundbreaking technological upgrade.
Compared with the current A75 architecture, the A76 has a 35% performance improvement, 20% lower power consumption, and supports ARM’s latest big and small core technologies.
In addition, the A76 architecture also better supports artificial intelligence-related applications such as speech recognition, image recognition, and smart assistants.
In the original historical development, the emergence of the A76 architecture has brought about an epic improvement in the performance of mobile processor chips.
Many classic chips, such as Kirin 980, 990, 985 and 820, as well as the Fire Dragon 855 series, are designed based on the A76 architecture.
Even after the arrival of the 5G era, in order to dominate the mid- and low-end markets, MediaTek specially released the Dimensity 700 series and Dimensity 6000 series, which also adopted the A76 architecture.
“In the words of Mr. Chen, Huateng Microelectronics now wants to cook a dish, but the ingredients provided by ARM are not fresh. Only when the A76 architecture is released can we make a really good dish.” An engineer from Huateng Semiconductor said excitedly at an internal meeting.
After some negotiations, ARM finally agreed to reduce the licensing fees for patents such as instruction sets and architectures from 320 million to 270 million per year.
This preferential treatment is obviously given in consideration of shareholder Chen Tong.
Despite obtaining patent authorization from ARM, Chen Tong was not in a hurry to let Huateng Semiconductor design mobile processor chips.
In his opinion, the company’s current priority is to upgrade its integrated semiconductor circuit design technology to Lv5 level.
In addition, Huateng Semiconductor also needs to wait for the release of A76 and G76 architectures and reach a cooperation with Ju factory to solve the technical defects of mobile processor chips in communication baseband.
By the end of June, Huateng United Microelectronics Co., Ltd. finally succeeded in building a factory in Yancheng.
This progress is one month ahead of the original plan, marking another important step forward in Huateng Microelectronics’ layout in the screen panel field.
At the same time, the hardware department of Blue Factory received an engineering OLED screen from Sanxin Company.
As one of the earliest manufacturers in China to cooperate with Sanxin, Blue Factory has gradually reduced its cooperation with Sanxin over the past year and instead handed over most of its orders to Huateng Microelectronics.
Even though the orders have decreased, Blue Factory and Sanxin still have a very close cooperative relationship.
This time, the screen sent by Sanxin surprised the hardware manager of Blue Factory.
This is a full-screen with a notch, and the display effect and screen quality are far superior to before.
After multiple tests, the hardware manager of Blue Factory had to admit that Sanxin’s screen was indeed amazing.
Especially compared with the OLED screens that Sanxin supplied to the Blue Factory in the past, both the color display and the screen brightness have been directly raised to a higher level.