Chereads / Harry Potter: Using science to be IMMORTAL / Chapter 139 - Chapter 139: Beating Competitors

Chapter 139 - Chapter 139: Beating Competitors

"To develop the Keystone system, we solved nearly a thousand technical challenges, applied for fifteen hundred patents, and the Keystone system's source code reached an astonishing ten million lines. Even after several optimizations, it still has a size of 200MB."

"This volume far exceeds the storage capacity of the largest hard drives in the personal computer field today, and even in the server field, there's hardly any single hardware that can accommodate it."

"The reason it's so huge, as I've explained before, is to meet our requirements for the best desktop system."

"But the reason we dared to make the system so large is only one: yes, we already have the hardware capable of running it smoothly."

"How do we allocate animation computing resources? The answer is, all to the graphics card."

"We realized that the logic of graphic computation is different from that of general processors. Using a CPU to perform graphic computations is actually a waste."

"So we developed an independent graphics processing unit—the graphics card, assigning all display-related computations to the graphics card, avoiding the waste of computing resources."

"The Blue Dragon graphics card has a 200MHz main frequency and 30MB of independent memory. Besides helping your computer complete some minor animation effects, it can also allow you to smoothly play some more graphics-intensive games."

"To demonstrate the performance of the Blue Dragon graphics card, we've made a game demo."

Saying this, Patrick opened an icon on the desktop.

It was a simple silhouette of an M16 assault rifle. Quickly, a menu appeared on the screen, and Patrick randomly selected a few options and clicked start.

The scene shifted, and a fully 3D building appeared on the screen, with Patrick playing as a SWAT member, storming a building with his teammates to fight numerous robbers.

Yes, this is a castrated version of CS, with only one map, a few weapons to choose from, and no online multiplayer function, only able to battle against computer-controlled enemies.

With its sharp-edged character models, terribly blurred textures, and stiff movements, no one would give it a second glance in the era before Morpheus's time travel.

But this is still 1990, an era dominated by arcade games, where almost all fun computer games were ports of arcade games, and most were 2D side-scrollers.

A 3D computer game that allows full directional and full perspective movement was something nobody had seen or even dared to dream of.

Isn't it that game developers don't want to make a game with more realistic graphics and more immersive gameplay?

Of course not, it's just that at this level of hardware, just running some sophisticated 2D sprite animations is nearly exhausting the performance.

3D, gunfights? That's stuff of dreams.

But now, someone has made those dreams a reality.

To demonstrate the effect, Patrick seemed to have practiced this game, quickly killing two terrorists before being blown up by a grenade.

But the game continued, with computer-controlled teammates and enemies still fighting.

"My marksmanship isn't very accurate," Patrick said with a self-deprecating smile. "Usually, I get killed before entering the warehouse."

But now, no one cared about Patrick's gaming skills. A young Japanese man from Nintendo stood up, "Excuse me, what chip does this graphics card use? Do you plan to sell this chip?"

"The graphics card uses the Blue Dragon GPU, which stands for Graphics Processing Unit, with a 200MHz main frequency, utilizing 0.3 micron technology, containing 3 million transistors, its computing power surpasses all existing commercial chips. We've specially designed it to be more suited for graphic image processing."

"We certainly plan to sell this chip, but due to production capacity, we can only prioritize supplying our own products for now. However, we plan to launch this chip to the market next year."

Next year...

Meaning this chip with absolute technical dominance will be monopolized by computer-end products—or rather, by Queen of Blue computers for an entire year.

At least for the next year, the Queen of Blue computer will remain the most outstanding, high-end gaming platform.

The young Japanese man immediately picked up the phone; he must report this to the headquarters immediately.

Another young man stood up, not asking about the Blue Dragon graphics card but about the storage hardware, "You mentioned earlier that this Keystone system has a capacity of up to 200MB, but you said it's loaded on an SSD solid-state drive. Does this mean Umbrella Corporation has developed solid-state drives with capacities exceeding 200MB?"

"How many storage particles did you use? And what is the approximate price?"

Patrick glanced at the man's position, oh, IBM.

"In fact," Patrick said, "our solid-state drive capacity has reached 500MB. As for its storage particles, there are 25 of them. The price is ten thousand pounds."

Meaning each storage chip has a capacity of 20MB.

The average price per MB of storage capacity is 20 pounds.

This sounds like a very expensive price, but considering IBM introduced the world's first solid-state drive last year with only 1MB capacity, and its price was a whopping 3500 dollars! And its performance wasn't even better than ordinary hard drives.

But Umbrella Corporation's solid-state drives' response speed has far surpassed ordinary mechanical hard drives, exceeding IBM by who knows how many times.

With a price difference of nearly a hundred times, the performance is still better.

It's foreseeable that the flash memory market will be dominated by Umbrella Corporation in the future.

As for floppy disks and the like, forget them. With such cheap flash memory, who would use those mediocre things?

IBM's storage chip path is completely blocked.

Then, Patrick introduced a mechanical hard drive with a huge capacity of 100GB and a read-write speed of 3200 rpm, as well as a massive 50MB memory—Mana.

Compared to the current general 1GB or so hard drive capacity and about 1MB memory capacity, these are two more bombs capable of annihilating competitors into dust.

Next is the LCD monitor.

Currently, computer and TV display devices are generally CRT cathode ray tube monitors, which are bulky and heavy, and due to the deviation range limit of cathode ray tubes, generally choose a 4:3 display ratio.

Even if Apple's computers made some appearance designs on monitors, making them look more modern and with a unique design aesthetic, they would all seem outdated and backward in front of 16:9 widescreen, ultra-thin, and lightweight LCD monitors.

Especially after displaying the advantages of LCD panels in the form of a shocking large screen wall, Patrick's statement "LCD is the future of the display market" took root in everyone's hearts.

Finally, the chip.

This part is actually the simplest.

No need to show any design sensibility or humanitarian care, Patrick just put the Silver Dragon No. 1's numbers on the screen.

0.2 micron process, ten million transistors, 1GHz frequency.

This is equivalent to products around the year 2000. Keep in mind, the most advanced 486 processor at this time only has about 1.2 million transistors and just surpassed 100MHz in frequency. Faced with a monster whose performance is ten times its own, it's like trying to block a droplet with space armor, being instantly obliterated is the only outcome.

At this moment, all attending giants of the electronics industry, IBM, Intel, Microsoft... all understood Patrick's initial statement.

I hope you won't hate me too much after this...

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