The 486 that Zhang Dongshuo wanted is no longer appealing.
Now he's completely absorbed in quantum chip data. Xing Baohua's large villa has become a luxurious office and research lab. He sleeps when he's tired and eats when he's hungry—a very free environment.
Designing these things really takes a lot of brainpower. Especially for chips, you have to fit tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or even billions of transistors into a space the size of a fingernail, which is equivalent to one-tenth of a brain cell.
A 5-nanometer chip contains roughly the same number of transistors as brain cells.
However, the arrangement and layering of transistors in a chip are all conceived by brain cells.
If you look inside with a microscope, you'll see densely packed layers; someone with trypophobia might get dizzy just looking at it.
Zhang Dongshuo had been scribbling and drawing in his notebooks for who knows what, and he'd already used over a dozen notebooks. Xing Baohua didn't dare disturb him, afraid of interrupting his train of thought.
Ever since Xing Baohua handed over all his work-related matters to his secretary Xie Yingying, he also got involved, using his mediocre skills.
Zhang Dongshuo was responsible for the overall architectural roadmap, not all of it.
Chips are divided into partitions and layers.
Each zone has a color that represents a different function: what the yellow zone is responsible for, what the red zone is responsible for, what the blue zone is responsible for, and so on.
Later, when working in teams, we would divide the area into color zones, and each color zone would be divided into teams, with a dozen or so people responsible for one zone.
If Zhang Dongshuo were in charge of the entire chip, he would be exhausted.
This is just a traditional process; some transistor areas can be copied from the previous generation's pattern arrangement. This achieves Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit roughly doubles every 18 to 24 months. In other words, processor performance roughly doubles every two years, while the price drops to half of what it was before.
All semiconductors are driven by this principle, resulting in an ever-increasing number of transistors in chips.
When there are so many that they can't be contained, this rule becomes invalid.
Especially in the civilian market, there's really no need for such advanced technology. It's not like it's going to fly or land; it's just for browsing the web, using chat software, watching movies, and listening to music—the demand isn't high.
Young people enjoy playing games and may have some requirements for hardware configuration, but apart from wealthy families, most ordinary people can only afford high-performance hardware.
Many of these people have only a superficial understanding of computers, focusing solely on performance, but most don't know how to use computers for their actual purposes.
Not to mention the office computers used by office workers. Even professional graphic designers won't be given the best configurations; they'll all be several generations behind. Of course, this excludes wealthy companies.
Xing Baohua also studied the materials and learned from Zhang Dongshuo. As a person with a technical background, he was able to get started quickly.
Although he couldn't help Zhang Dongshuo much, Xing Baohua could help him find this literature or that technical parameter.
But that afternoon, Zhang Dongshuo looked distressed, threw down his pen, and started tearing up the notebook he had been taking notes in.
Xing Baohua was stunned and quickly stepped forward to stop them, since these handwritten drafts were the result of their hard work over the past few days.
"What's going on? Hey! Stop! Don't tear it! Maybe it'll still be useful!" Xing Baohua grabbed Zhang Dongshuo's arm and snatched a calculation book.
For some reason, Zhang Dongshuo lost control of his emotions. Xing Baohua was also trying her best to calm him down.
“There will be times when you fail in experiments. Failure is the mother of success. As researchers, we all know this. There’s no need to rush. Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Xing Baohua patiently advised.
Several minutes later, Zhang Dongshuo calmed down and said, "I made a mistake from the beginning. I made a basic mistake."
"It's alright. It's good to admit your mistakes and correct them. Luckily, we discovered it early. If you're not sure, we can start from the beginning. If you feel you're lacking an assistant, just say so, and I'll help you find someone. How about we find a few physics experts to help you with quantum physics?"
After Xing Baohua finished speaking, Zhang Dongshuo shook his head slightly and said, "Physics experts are not needed for the time being; what is needed are mathematicians."
"Okay, I'll make the call right now. What do you think is wrong? Well, calm down first. I'll have someone get you some coffee and snacks. I'm going to make the call. The cigarettes are on the table, help yourself!" Xing Baohua said, starting to ask for the phone number.
I saw Xie Yingying as soon as I went out, and told her to send some coffee and bread inside.
Xing Baohua then made phone calls to gather more people. Of course, they wouldn't use those national-level math experts like they did last time to decrypt the data; they would just invite a few professors or outstanding students from several universities.
The company also has mathematical geniuses, but Xing Baohua will not use them for the time being due to the extraordinary circumstances.
When Xing Baohua came back, he brought some beer, knowing that Zhang Dongshuo couldn't drink much baijiu.
I can drink a few more bottles of beer, though.
There weren't many side dishes, just drinks and conversation.
“The architecture of quantum chips and the architecture of semiconductor chips are completely different worlds. At first, we even borrowed from the semiconductor architecture, but who knew that this mistake would be a huge one,” Zhang Dongshuo said with a wry smile.
Xing Baohua nodded as if he were playing the straight man in a comedy duo, and said, "Yes! In terms of technique, there is also the saying that a small mistake can lead to a huge error."
"We all know that semiconductor chips have only two logical states: one is on and off, and the other is whether the power level changes or remains the same. This means that internally, only 0 and 1 can be used as basic units, and all information we force into the chip is converted into binary."
"Yes"
"Take the 386 chip we are currently using as an example. It is a 32-bit processor, which means that it can only change a maximum of 32 0s and 1s into another type of 0 and 1 at a time."
This chapter is not finished yet. Please click on the next page to continue reading the exciting content!
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
