1991 Starting from the core

Su Yuanshan and Li Mingliu followed Chen Daohua into work clothes and entered the dust-free workshop.

Of course, no matter how special their status is, they will not wait until they arrive before starting the assembly line. So when they entered the workshop, the cut PCB boards were already on the SMT (surface soldering) assembly line.

Since they are only engineering sample cards, and there are not many chips sent from Xinghai, there are only twenty graphics cards in this batch, and they are still at a 100% yield rate.

Chen Daohua was not sure whether Su Yuanshan and Li Mingliu had seen the assembly line, so he explained in detail: "In the PCB factory, after the PCB board is printed and punched, it will be sent over, put on the SMT workpiece table, coated with solder paste, and then automatically mounted. After the patching is completed, the PCB board will be sent to the oven to melt the solder paste.”

"Our SMT line uses Sony's placement machine, and the yield rate is very high." Chen Daohua added when he saw Su Yuanshan staring at the placement machine.

Su Yuanshan smiled and nodded: "Will we have to inspect it again next?"

"Yes, after the patch is completed, manual inspection will be carried out. After the inspection passes, it will enter the next step of the assembly line, the hand plug-in assembly line. Here, some components that are inconvenient for machine welding are installed manually, such as slots, interfaces, vertical capacitors, and In-line packaged components, etc.”

Chen Daohua led Su Yuanshan forward: "After the hand insertion line is completed, it enters wave soldering. After coming out of the wave soldering machine, the soldering feet are repaired, and then a manual inspection is performed. Basically, a board is finalized. The rest is the function. Testing, packaging, random inspection, and finally shipment.”

Li Mingliu glanced around and found that the graphics card that was first put on the SMT assembly line had come out of the oven. He smiled and said, "It seems that the PCB printing cycle is the slowest."

Chen Daohua nodded: "Yes, the more layers there are, the slower it will be, but the speed is not bad under standard assembly line operation. After all, it is a motherboard that prints a large piece and then cuts it into small pieces."

Su Yuanshan asked: "Is the printing workshop the same as making chips in a wafer factory? The more chips that can be cut on a wafer, the lower the cost?" This is why Su Yuanshan must introduce eight-inch chips when introducing a wafer factory. The reason - because until 2020, the eight-inch production line will still be useful.

Chen Daohua said with a smile: "This is true when it is convenient to cut. However, the cost of the PCB board is very low. The main cost of the board is various chips and high-standard components. It can only be said that the smaller the PCB board, the better The greater the shipment volume.”

The three of them were visiting the workshop, and Su Yuanshan noticed that almost all of the employees were young people. At this time, due to the high wages and "high grade" of assembly line workers in various electronic factories, a group of people wanted to come in due to their trust relationships... Far from being able to recruit people at all in some periods in later generations.

Not long after, the first graphics card finally came off the assembly line and entered the testing phase.

"Now that the professional testing equipment is not in place, we can only test with a multimeter first." Chen Daohua chuckled and said: "Fortunately, they are all engineering cards, and the quantity is not large. When the time comes, we will directly test on the machine, and Xinghai will send it to us. Got a DEMO version of the game and test software.”

...(The assembly line of board cards is probably such a process. Guys who have worked in electronics factories should know better than me... If I am wrong, please feel free to correct it in this chapter.)

Without waiting for all the graphics cards to be offline, Chen Daohua took two graphics cards and led the two of them out of the workshop and into a technical testing room.

Here, two brand new computers are ready.

Su Yuanshan held an accelerator card and looked at the OCSS and Sirius on the core, and a strange emotion arose spontaneously. He handed over the naming rights of this accelerator card to the graphics card team. After a long discussion, Scott and others still followed the old path of history.

Yes, the former 3DFX team still believed that 3D was a kind of belief.

And this belief should also be in bad taste.

Therefore, they named the core of this card Sirius, and the graphics card VOODOO, which means Voodoo (Voodoo) in English, and the Chinese transliteration is Voodoo.

The two computers prepared by Chen Daohua use Pentium processors with a frequency of 66MHz.

The memory uses two ultra-large capacity 32M 72-pin SIMM memory sticks, totaling 64M.

//Note: SIMM is a packaging form of memory modules. It does not refer to chip packaging, but a standard for the application, arrangement, and integration of memory particles in memory modules. The full name is single in-line memory module. )

The motherboard is of course produced by Meijie and is the highest-end motherboard that supports Pentium processors.

It is no exaggeration to say that once the VOODOO3D accelerator card is plugged in, it will be the most luxurious personal computer to date.

"Where's the camera?" Chen Daohua asked the technician who was standing aside to watch.

Someone replied, "He'll be there soon."

Chen Daohua nodded, turned off the computer, and then, together with Su Yuanshan, inserted the VOODOO accelerator card into the PCI slot, and then connected the 2D graphics card.

The reason why it is called a 3D accelerator card instead of a graphics card is because the 3D core at this time is just the same as in history. It is just a pure 3D acceleration core. It cannot display the picture and is only responsible for accelerating the 3D part.

Of course, the next-generation core that is already under development will integrate display functions and become a true GPU.

In fact, Su Yuanshan also considered launching the GPU as soon as possible at that time - this is not technically difficult. The main reason is that Su Yuanshan had the same concerns as the 3DFX people in the previous life. At this time, there were dozens of 2D graphics card manufacturers. Launching a GPU rashly means making enemies of everyone—and God knows how many enemies there will be.

It would be fine if these enemies only pursued them technically, but Su Yuanshan knew that those guys could do anything if they were in a hurry, and it would be annoying if they talked about 3D being useless every day.

Now it is launched in the form of an accelerator card in conjunction with 2D graphics cards, which not only takes care of the manufacturers of 2D graphics cards, but also does not "waste" existing graphics cards for users. This combination is very good.

As several people came over carrying cameras, Su Yuanshan and Chen Daohua also turned on their cameras at the same time.

The first thing to run was the test software. Due to time constraints, the test software was designed very roughly and only tested the generation of polygons. And there is no scoring standard, the function tends to test whether the graphics card is qualified and stable.

After running the test, Su Yuanshan and Chen Daohua opened a beta version called Quake.

Looking at the main interface that was almost the same as in his memory, Su Yuanshan smiled slightly and quickly entered the game.

The moment the game screen appeared, Su Yuanshan heard a cry from someone beside him.

Even Li Mingliu, who had never been interested in games, stood beside Su Yuanshan and watched him press the keyboard, control the character to move quickly, and search for equipment all over the floor.

Then encounter the enemy and shoot.

The models are spot on and so are the pyrotechnics.

As the game progressed, praises could be heard from behind Su Yuanshan.

However, the game ended after only five minutes - after all, this is just a DEMO version.

The entire test was extremely smooth and without any lag.

However, Su Yuanshan visually estimated that it only reached the sky for about thirty frames.

Su Yuanshan put down the mouse and turned to face the camera.

With a smile on his face: "Scott, good job. John, also good job. I hope you can appear at CES (International Consumer Electronics Show) at the same time in two months."

"Next, let's try an ordinary computer." Su Yuanshan turned around and said to the technician: "The main test is AMD and Cyrix CPUs, and the memory is also reduced to mainstream configurations."