Hogwarts: From Selling White Peppers to Becoming a God

Chapter 141 Beating Up Competitors

"In order to develop the Cornerstone System, we solved nearly a thousand technical problems, applied for 1,500 technical patents, and the source code of the Cornerstone System reached an astonishing ten million lines. Even after several optimizations, its size is still a huge 200M."

"This amount of data far exceeds the storage capacity of the largest hard drive in the current personal computer industry, and even in the server industry, there is almost no single piece of hardware that can hold it."

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

"But there's only one reason why we dare to make the system so big: yes, we already have the hardware to run it smoothly."

"How should we allocate our animation processing resources? The answer is, all of them should be allocated to the graphics card."

"We realized that the logic of graphics computing is different from that of general-purpose processors, and using the CPU to perform graphics computing is actually a waste."

"So we developed a separate graphics processing unit—the graphics card—to handle all the computer's display-related calculations, thus avoiding the waste of computing resources."

"The Blue Dragon graphics card boasts a 200 MHz clock speed and 30MB of dedicated memory. Besides helping your computer execute small animation effects, it also allows you to smoothly play games that require more complex graphics processing."

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

As he spoke, Patrick opened an icon on the desktop.

It was a simple silhouette of an M16 assault rifle. Soon a menu bar appeared on the screen, and Patrick randomly selected a few items before clicking start.

The scene shifts to a fully 3D building, where Patrick plays a SWAT officer who storms into the building with his teammates and engages in a gunfight with numerous robbers.

Yes, this is a stripped-down version of CS, with only one map, a handful of weapons to choose from, and no online multiplayer function; you can only fight against computer-controlled enemies.

The sharply defined character models, the blurry textures, and the stiff, lifeless movements would have been unremarkable in Murphy's time-traveling era, and no one would have given them a second glance.

But this was still 1990, an era when the video game industry was dominated by arcades. Almost all the fun PC games were ports of arcade games, and the vast majority of them were 2D side-scrolling games.

A 3D computer game that allows for movement in all directions and from all angles—not only have you never seen it, but you've never even dared to imagine it.

Do game developers not want to make a game with more realistic graphics and a more immersive experience?

Of course not, it's just that with the current hardware capabilities, simply running some exquisite 2D texture animations is almost exhausting the performance.

3D, gunfights? That's something in your dreams.

But now, someone has brought the things from our dreams to life.

To demonstrate the effect, Patrick seemed to have practiced the game, and soon killed two terrorists before being blown up by a grenade.

But the scene continues, with the computer-controlled teammates and enemies still battling.

"My marksmanship isn't very good," Patrick chuckled self-deprecatingly. "I usually get shot before I even get into the warehouse."

But now, nobody cared about Patrick's gaming skills anymore. A young Japanese man from Nintendo stood up and asked, "Excuse me, what chip does this graphics card use? Are you planning to sell this chip?"

"The graphics card uses Blue Dragon GPU, which stands for Graphics Processor. It has a 200 MHz clock speed, uses a 0.3 micrometer process, and has 300 million transistors. Its computing power exceeds that of all existing commercial chips. We have also specially designed it to be more suitable for graphics and image processing."

"We certainly intend to sell this chip, but due to production capacity constraints, we can only prioritize supplying it to our own products at the moment. However, we expect to launch this chip to the market around next year."

next year……

In other words, this chip, which has absolute technological dominance, will be dominated by computer products—or rather, by computers for a whole year.

For at least the next year, computers will remain the best and most high-end gaming platforms.

The young Japanese man immediately picked up the phone; he had to report the matter to headquarters right away.

Another young man stood up, but his question wasn't about the Blue Dragon graphics card; it was about the storage hardware. "You mentioned earlier that this foundational system has a capacity of up to 200MB, but you said it was installed on an SSD. Does that mean Umbrella Corporation has developed SSDs with capacities exceeding 200MB?"

"How many storage chips did you use? Approximately how much did they cost?"

Patrick glanced at the other party's location. Oh, IBM.

“In fact,” Patrick said, “our solid-state drives have a capacity of 500MB/s. As for its storage chips, there are 25 of them. The price is £10,000.”

In other words, each storage chip has a capacity of up to 20M.

On average, each megabyte of storage capacity is worth £20.

This sounds like an extremely expensive price, but you should know that last year IBM launched the world's first solid-state drive, which only had a 1MB capacity and cost a whopping $3500! And its performance was even worse than that of a regular hard drive.

However, Umbrella Corporation's solid-state drives have a response speed that far exceeds that of ordinary mechanical hard drives, many times faster than IBM's.

With a price difference of nearly 100 times, the performance is even better.

It is foreseeable that the future flash memory market will be dominated by Umbrella Corporation.

As for floppy disks and the like, forget about them. With such cheap flash memory, who would still use that useless thing?

IBM's path to memory chips has been completely blocked.

Next, Patrick introduced the computer's 100GB mechanical hard drive with a read/write speed of 3200 RPM, and the 50MB of massive memory—Mana.

Compared to the average hard drive capacity of around 1GB and memory capacity of around 1MB at the time, these were two heavyweights that could wipe out competitors.

Next up is the LCD screen.

At that time, computer and television display devices were generally CRT electronic picture tube monitors, which were huge and bulky, and due to the limited range of the electronic picture tube, they generally chose a 4:3 display ratio.

Even though Apple has made some design changes to the monitors to make them look more modern and have a unique aesthetic, they still look outdated compared to the 16:9 widescreen, ultra-thin and lightweight LCD monitors.

Especially after showcasing the advantages of LCD panels in such a stunning way as a super-large screen wall, Patrick's statement, "LCD is the future of the display market," took root in everyone's mind.

Finally, there's the chip.

This part is actually the simplest.

There was no need to showcase any design or humanistic considerations; Patrick simply displayed the numerical values ​​of Silver Dragon One on the screen.

0.2-micron process, ten million transistors, 1 GHz clock speed.

This is equivalent to a product from around 2000 years in the future. Keep in mind that the most advanced 486 processor at that time only had 120 million transistors and a clock speed of just over 100 MHz. Facing a monster with ten times the performance of itself, it was like a space force trying to block a drop of water being instantly annihilated into dust. That was the only outcome.

At that moment, all the giants from various electronics industries present—IBM, Intel, Microsoft—understood Patrick's very first words.

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

Thank you for the generous donation, Yueban Dun'er! Thank you for your support!

Starting in the next chapter, the plot is about to take a wild leap forward! Ladies and gentlemen, buckle up!

(End of this chapter)