September 15, 1994.

Shenzhen City Airport.

Pang Xuelin and Liu Qi stood at the passenger exit together, and watched Ni Guangnan and an old lady in her sixties walk out with a dozen men and women of different ages from afar.

The old lady dressed in a simple and elegant manner. Although she was over 60 years old, with fair skin and delicate face, her youthful style could be vaguely seen between her eyebrows and eyes.

Pang Xuelin took the initiative to greet him: "Mr. Ni, welcome to Shenzhen City, who is this?"

Pang Xuelin's eyes turned to the old lady beside Ni Guangnan.

Ni Guangnan smiled and said, "Mr. Pang, let me introduce you to you. This is Academician Xia Peisu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. I heard that you are planning to do HiSilicon. She came here to take a look this time."

"Hello, Academician Xia!"

Pang Xuelin and Xia Peisu shook hands and said with a smile.

In fact, long before Ni Guangnan made a statement, Pang Xuelin vaguely guessed the other party's identity.

Xia Peisu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the founder of China's computer industry, is known as the mother of China's electronic computers, and is also an extremely rare female computer expert in this era.

In 1958, she was responsible for designing and developing the general electronic digital computer 107. This was the first general electronic digital computer developed by China. It proved with facts and actions that the Chinese at that time had the ability and ambition to design and develop their own computers.

She proposed the principle of maximum time difference pipeline that greatly improves the computing speed of computers, which greatly shortens the clock cycle of pipeline computers.

In addition, she also effectively solved the problem of waveform distortion during high-speed signal transmission in large computers.

This research result was adopted or referenced by many domestic units that developed large high-speed computers. Based on this, she also formulated specific engineering design specifications for the many high-performance computers she was responsible for designing and developing later, and achieved good signal transmission results.

She was responsible for successfully developing the high-speed array processor 150-ap. The computing speed of the 150 computer is 1 million times/second, while the computing speed of the 150-ap reaches 14 million times/second. The computing speed at low cost is higher than the computing speed of similar products that the United States embargoed against China at that time. It has attracted great attention internationally and has made a significant contribution to China's oil exploration.

She presided over the functional distributed computer system and led the team to successfully develop the GF10 series of computers, making this direction a focus of research for a period of time in the Institute of Computing.

In addition, she also founded the most influential Journal of Computer Science in China and the journal Fputeiene and Tehnology issued abroad; she presided over the compilation of the English-Chinese Computer Dictionary, etc.

In later generations, Academician Xia Peisu was hailed as the mother of computers in China and had a high status in the field of computers.

"Hello, Mr. Pang!"

Xia Peisu looked at Pang Xuelin with some scrutiny.

She has heard a lot of rumors about this young man, such as the genius boy, the youngest richest man, and a young entrepreneur.

But what attracted Xia Peisu the most was the paper written by Pang Xuelin on the outline of computer and Internet development.

That paper's high-level explanation of the entire ICT industry gives people a dreamy feeling of breaking through time and space and seeing through the fog of the future.

Because of this, Xia Peisu became very interested in Pang Xuelin.

It’s a pity that when she wanted to talk to Pang Xuelin, she realized that Pang Xuelin had gone to the United States.

Nearly half a year has passed since this delay.

This time she accidentally learned from Ni Guangnan that Pang Xuelin would set up HiSilicon Semiconductor in Shenzhen City and invited Ni Guangnan and his team to join. She also came with her on a whim.

Pang Xuelin and Xia Peisu exchanged a few greetings, and then Ni Guangnan first introduced Pang Xuelin to the team members he brought out from Lenovo.

These people are all talents in the field of microelectronics that Ni Guangnan has found ways to dig from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and various universities. Most of them are not famous, but Pang Xuelin did not expect to find several big shots from these people.

After all, this era is a dark era for China's semiconductor industry. If it had not intervened itself, China would have to explore for at least many years. After experiencing many setbacks, it would slowly get on track after 2010.

However, the two students brought by Xia Peisu attracted Pang Xuelin's attention.

One of them is Hu Weiwu, the father of Longxin in later generations.

This is a great man.

Hu Weiwu was born in a teacher family in Yongkang, Zhejiang. He was weak at birth, so his father named him "Weiwu", hoping that his son would be strong, strong and heroic.

In September 1986, Hu Weiwu entered the University of Science and Technology of China as the top scorer in the college entrance examination in Yongkang County, Zhejiang Province.

But the momentum of the University of Science and Technology of China was still above that of Tsinghua and Peking University.

Among the six or seven hundred students admitted by the University of Science and Technology, 13 are the top scorers in the provincial college entrance examination.

This shows Hu Weiwu's strength in high school.

After entering university, Hu Weiwu showed amazing talent. In college, he used 74xx films to weld an 8086 CPU.

In July 1991, after Hu Weiwu graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China, he entered the Institute of Computer Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences without examination to pursue a doctorate degree.

During his doctoral studies, his supervisor was Academician Xia Peisu.

From undergraduate to master's degree and doctoral degree, Hu Weiwu has always been in China and can be called a real "local school", and he even nicknamed himself "the local school".

He should have many opportunities to study abroad. His doctoral thesis won the "Special Award for the President's Scholarship of the Chinese Academy of Sciences" and the first "National 100 Excellent Doctoral Thesis" Award. One of the awards is going abroad for public expenses.

But Hu Weiwu still decided to stay in China and willingly become a "domestic".

Hu Weiwu's level is undoubtedly the two textbooks "Basics Computer Architecture" and "Computer Architecture" written by him are classics. They use the method of slapping a cow to tell the computer system and explain it very thoroughly.

When Pang Xuelin was studying computer-related materials in the real world, he read the textbooks written by Hu Weiwu.

It’s a pity that fate is due to it.

In early 2000, when the Institute of Computer Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences decided to develop a general-purpose processor, Hu Weiwu chose the mips architecture instead of the arm architecture that was later in full swing.

But this is also hindsight.

In fact, before 2000, the strongest core design that the arm could produce was just the very original arm11, which had no out-of-order execution, no multiple launches, and no cache system.

Loongson's original goal was to desktop and supercomputing systems, requiring high computing performance and to compete with the x86 system.

In contrast, the mips architecture achieved advanced designs such as out-of-order four-transmission, deep pipeline, branch prediction, register renaming, load-store speculation, etc. in the 1990s. It is one of the CPU architectures that can compete with the x86 system worldwide, and was once glorious.

Home game consoles that were popular all over the world in the 1990s generally adopted the mips architecture CPU, such as the well-known Sony Playstation 1 A, later PSP, Nintendo N64 i, and Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, Cisco, Qualcomm, Sun, and 3, which used mips chips in switches, routers, and communication equipment.

When the patent barrier that had been operating in the x86 camp for many years could not be broken, the choice to start for Chinese CPUs at that time was nothing more than mips, alhpa, and arm.

Arm is still underestimating its responsibilities in childhood. The mips architecture is used by a large number of Japanese technology companies as the maincpu for user terminal devices for its excellent computing performance. This has important reference value. Hu Weiwu, the father of Loongson, chose mips.

But no one expected that the previously popular mips architecture would eventually fall and scatter, and the dragon core became the only user of this architecture.

Loongson started operating independently very early and was responsible for its own profits and losses.

In the nearly twenty years since its birth, Hu Weiwu's team has provided support to our country's development in supercomputing, military, aerospace and other fields with meager returns and the hard support of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

And formed an independent chip system.

The total R&D expenses in the past twenty years are only less than 2 billion, which is equivalent to a fraction of Intel's annual R&D expenses.

Without the full support of the country and the support of relevant industries, Hu Weiwu can be said to have achieved the ultimate he can do.

In his 20 years of teaching and research career, Hu Weiwu has also brought many top talents in the field of microelectronics.

The most famous one is Chen Yunji, who later founded the artificial intelligence chip Cambrian.

This big shot led the Intelligent Processor Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to develop the world's first dedicated deep learning processor chip, which is considered a pioneer and pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence chips.

"Mr. Pang, what's wrong?"

Xia Peisu couldn't help but feel a little strange when he saw Pang Xuelin's eyes always staring at his disciples.

Pang Xuelin shook his head and said with a smile: "Nothing."

According to the time calculation, this year should be the last academic year for Hu Weiwu to study with Xia Peisu. Pang Xuelin felt sorry for such a big man with solid foundation and unlimited potential if he didn't fool him into his own hands to work.

Next, Pang Xuelin and Liu Qi took Xia Peisu and Ni Guangnan on a bus, and first led everyone to settle in a five-star hotel in Shenzhen.

After lunch and the reception, Pang Xuelin took Ni Guangnan and Xia Peisu to the Shenyi Industrial Building in Nanshan District.

This is also the headquarters of Huawei.

Pang Xuelin has used money to spend 500 million rmb to completely buy the building and prepare it to be used as the headquarters of Warwick and HiSilicon in the next few years.

Warwick also avoids moving around as it expands in scale.

After arriving at the Shenyi Industrial Building, Ren Zhengfei and the others had been waiting for a long time.

Pang Xuelin first asked Ren Zhengfei to bring those people brought by Ni Guangnan over to visit, and he took Xia Peisu and Ni Guangnan to walk around the building first to familiarize them with the next office environment. Then, Pang Xuelin took them to the conference room of Warwick Company.

Ni Guangnan knew that Pang Xuelin actually owned 49% of Warwick's shares, and couldn't help but sigh: "Mr. Pang, Warwick's current program-controlled switches are selling well in the market. The market occupied by the program-controlled switches developed by Lenovo is almost eroded by you. I didn't expect that Warwick is actually your company. In addition to that Star Ring Technology, which has made a fortune in gold, I think you deserve the title of China's richest man."

Pang Xuelin smiled and said, "Mr. Ni, these are just false names. To be honest, making money has no meaning to me. What I value more is whether we can convert money into the scientific research resources we need."

Ni Guangnan nodded and said, "Mr. Pang, then I won't talk nonsense to you. If HiSilicon wants to develop chips, have you considered the architecture? There are not many people on the market that can compete with the x86 architecture."

Pang Xuelin smiled and shook his head, saying, "Mr. Ni, I originally wanted to acquire the arm architecture and do it myself, but it failed. The British refused to sell the arm to us. So after thinking about it, I think if we really build a chip that really belongs to our own, then we must design a set of our own architecture system."

"Our own architecture system?"

Ni Guangnan and Xia Peisu looked at each other and said in surprise: "Mr. Pang, this difficulty is not as simple as you think."

The most difficult thing to develop a new architecture is not the technical level, but time, money, and ecosystem.

On the one hand, R&D architecture actually requires time accumulation and a lot of financial support.

Without these two things, there is basically no way to talk about the research and development of new architectures.

But at the same time, the ecosystem is also a top priority.

x86 desktop processor market, arm's low power consumption market, mips cheap market.

Even if you develop a new instruction set, if others don’t use it, you won’t have money to get it if you don’t use it, and if you don’t have money to get it, you won’t be able to continue to develop. This is a vicious cycle.
To be continued...