America: The Godfather of Game Development

Chapter 156 The Patent of Gold Bars

Chapter 156 The Patent of Gold Bars

Although Civilization is a turn-based strategy game, it doesn't have the same high performance requirements as real-time games.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't require high-end hardware.

It doesn't actually consume much processor resources, and if the image requirements aren't high, it doesn't even take up much of the display chip's resources.

After all, it doesn't have a large number of high-speed Pokémon like The King of Fighters.

But it consumes a lot of memory!

The status of numerous plots, units, and cities, along with snapshots taken each round, consumes a significant amount of memory.

This could be fatal.

Lin Lixin did a quick estimate of the required memory capacity and immediately felt a headache coming on.

"That really proves the old saying true."

Short-term chip shortage, long-term energy shortage —

Always lacking storage!

Whether it's RAM or external storage, from the very beginning until now, it has always been like a pair of shackles tightly clamping him down.

It's worth noting that Nintendo's Famicom only had 2KB of RAM and video memory.

"Super Marathon" is only 40KB in size.

This is simply unimaginable for GAMENOVA products that are often 1MB in size.

"I do have a more advanced design solution—"

Lin Lixin now possesses some semiconductor technology, so developing faster and larger capacity memory wouldn't be difficult. The problem is—

"This is way too expensive!"

Memory is always a gold standard, regardless of the era.

A single 1Mb memory chip costs over $30.

If he wants to add 1MB of memory to the NovaXeno, it will cost at least $300.

This is simply unbelievable for a home computer.

"Sega Mega Drive specifications — 72KB RAM + 64KB VRAM + 8KB audio RAM —"

This console, which was released in 88, is just like the NovaBo is to an 8-bit machine in terms of performance.

Dimensional reduction attack!

I said—

Sam suddenly spoke, interrupting Lin Lixin's thoughts.

He had been listening to Lin Lixin's rambling for almost half an hour, and he roughly understood what was going on.

"Why not just provide expansion memory slots? Let players choose to add more memory themselves."

"————?!"

Lin Lixin sat bolt upright. "Holy crap, it really is!"

There's absolutely no need to pursue a Sega Mega Drive that will completely crush the future.

All we need to do is make NovaXeno sufficiently extensible.

With SGI, NeXT, and Dell's technologies combined, designing a game console with a PC assembly mindset is not impossible.

The system includes a reserved slot for a graphics card and a 3-pin SIMM memory slot, ensuring that by the time Sega releases its new console, there will already be plenty of hardware compatible with the NovaXeno available, so its performance will not be outdated.

With its built-in 512KB or even 256KB, it's perfectly adequate if you squeeze in some extra space.

In particular, he now has a perfect solution that can increase memory speed several times over.

"Notify Gerald to revise the design. I'm going to find Vivian."

"Memory improvement technology? What does that mean?"

Vivian was momentarily stunned by Lin Lixin's utterly absurd words.

She was naturally aware that Lin Lixin had been actively recruiting IC design teams in Silicon Valley, and that some of them were even already handing over their work to MicroNova.

But she thought Lin Lixin only intended to set up his own wafer fab to produce memory chips in order to further reduce costs.

But now, listening to what he's saying, it seems like it's completely different from what I thought.

"That's right, this is the design I created before, I call it the SDRAM architecture."

"SDRAM?"

Vivian tilted her head slightly in confusion.

Although she specializes in graphics, she is still an electrical engineering major and has a deep understanding of memory technology.

But SDRAM was something she had never heard of before.

Is it a combination of DRAM and SRAM technologies? High-speed memory?

When it comes to high-speed memory, Vivian thinks of expensive SRAM. Due to its extremely high cost and much lower capacity than DRAM, SRAM is usually only used as a processor cache.

"No, the S stands for Sync, Synchronous."

Lin Lixin's lips curled up in a smile.

The memory used in the 80s was completely different from the DDR memory that became widespread later.

The enormous profits hidden within are enough to tempt any semiconductor company in the world.

However, the manufacturing process required for DDR memory has reached the limit of this era, and even if Lin Lixin could produce the corresponding architecture diagram, he would not be able to put it into production.

Even so, SDRAM, the predecessor of DDR, had a future.

"Based on this design, we can add a synchronous clock to the memory, making it synchronized with the CPU —"

Such a seemingly simple modification can increase memory operating speed several times over.

Because it brought something that was completely unimaginable in this era.

"Synchronize a clock? What's the use of that?"

"It can make the CPU faster."

"ha?"

Lin Lixin smiled and pointed to a pen on a table not far away.

"Bring me that pen."

Upon hearing this, Vivian, though puzzled, obediently went over and took the pen.

"You see, let's say this is the traditional asynchronous memory model."

Lin Lixin raised his pen. "During the process just now, I can be seen as the CPU, and you are my memory."

"I've given you the task from your master to retrieve the data from the address, and I'm just standing here waiting for you to bring it back."

"During this process, I need to keep an eye on you and constantly check whether you have retrieved the item. Only after I have retrieved the item can I move on to other things."

Vivian's eyes lit up.

After all, it was her major, and she understood what Lin Lixin was trying to say.

"I understand! Synchronized memory can eliminate this waiting time, allowing the CPU to do other things first."

In traditional memory architectures, when a processor issues an instruction to memory, it must wait for the memory to return the data and pull the signal high before continuing to execute the next instruction.

Even if this time is only 100 nanoseconds, with countless exchanges of information, it will accumulate and cause a huge waste of performance.

In fact, during this completely idle waiting time, the processor can certainly perform some other tasks.

Synchronous clocks allow the memory to operate in parallel with the processor.

This results in a tremendous improvement in the efficiency of both the CPU and memory.

Even more impressively, it can turn tasks into queues.

While reading the first set of data, we can already begin accepting the second set of addresses.

"Genius! This is next-generation technology!"

"Sam is already building a patent pool, and I hope that the core technology of this new memory architecture can be mastered by Mic."

"In roNova's hands."

Lin Lixin pressed down on Vivian's shoulder and said solemnly.

They must keep the core patents for memory in their own hands.

By simply partnering with other semiconductor giants like Micron through patent pools and cross-licensing, it can become a continuous money-printing machine.

Throughout the entire DDR era, from DDR1 to DDR5, the underlying technology still couldn't escape the synchronous clock concept of SDRAM.

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