20 years of restarting life

Chapter 3765 Conversation
After lunch, everyone went to rest at the nearby Optics Valley Hotel. Mills went into his room first, and Zhao Chang'an said to DeWeiner that they should have a cup of tea together. DeWeiner naturally understood what Zhao Chang'an meant, so he nodded and went into his room.

“Mills, that idiot, after I got to the R&D center this morning, I asked a friend at Infineon. Although Infineon decided to terminate its cooperation with Mosel, this is also related to our Ericsson's termination of its chip foundry cooperation with Siemens last February. Infineon and other wafer fabs under Siemens are more than enough to meet their current needs.”

DeWeiner said angrily, "Building an 8-inch wafer fab in mainland China is something outside of Siemens' plans. It involves your considerations regarding your stake in Imagination Technologies, hoping to manufacture DRAM for them and enter the Chinese market. You also hope to regain Ericsson's orders through cooperation with your company, utilizing the wafers and chips from the Jiangcheng plant. If a 12-inch fab is built, then it's not just for that purpose, but to serve as Siemens' most advanced wafer fab globally, supplying them with products worldwide."

"Don't be angry."

Zhao Chang'an lit a cigarette. De Weiner only smoked cigars, and he always carried a full set of tools, including cigar cutters, with him.

Seeing Zhao Chang'an light a cigarette, Dewey also took out a cigar, trimmed it with a cigar cutter, and then heated it with a lighter.

Once he sat down after a series of precise and fluid movements, he finally calmed down a bit.

"Whether Mills is truly foolish or not, the fact is that Jiangcheng has become extremely interested, and so many reporters have conducted interviews. If nothing unexpected happens, it will be broadcast on television tonight, saying that a cooperation on a 12-inch fab is being discussed in Jiangcheng."

At 7 or 8 pm in Jiangcheng, it is around 5 or 6 am in Western Europe. That is to say, when it is 8 or 9 am in Western Europe, and the senior executives of Siemens and Ericsson are completely confused, it is around 10 pm in Jiangcheng, a few hours later.

It is now 11 p.m. in Western Europe, which means that even two hours ago, DeWeiner could only call his friend who works at Infineon, but could not contact the company's senior management to report.

Fortunately, this whole mess was Mills' fault, and from Ericsson's perspective, the worst that could happen was that he simply wouldn't participate in the wafer fab partnership, so he was relatively more relaxed.

Zhao Chang'an said to DeWeiner, "Now that things have come to this, let's see how much discount and support Jiangcheng can offer to the wafer fab this afternoon."

DeWeiner looked at Zhao Chang'an with suspicion: "President Zhao also wants to start this 12-inch factory."

"I never thought we'd taken such a big step, but if Jiangcheng's efforts are strong enough to sway Siemens, then why should we say no?"

Zhao Chang'an's words made De Weiner fall into deep thought, which lasted for more than ten minutes. Meanwhile, Zhao Chang'an turned on the TV, turned down the volume, and passed the time.

"I think it's too difficult. It's not that Siemens' technology is inadequate, but the investment is so huge. In recent years, too many companies have entered the wafer fab field, to the point that many semiconductor companies have begun to advocate fabless, focusing solely on IC design and R&D. Although wafer fab shipments will definitely increase exponentially in the future, in the next few years, the market for application-specific chips and memory chips is saturated, while only a few companies currently possess the technology for CPU and GPU chips. The three CPU companies all have their own wafer fabs and chip factories, and the two GPU companies, NVIDIA and ATI, also have their own stable partner factories. Of course, ATI and RIM are both Canadian companies, so if you can secure their orders in the Asian region, that's a different story. Take Mosel Electronics, for example; they certainly know about the future growth in wafer sales, but first they have to consider surviving the winter before that."

Zhao Chang'an was certainly familiar with ATI. He had considered this Toronto-based company after RIM's stock price surged. However, by then, ATI's total market capitalization had exceeded $100 billion, and even the crisis in September of last year had not significantly impacted its stock price.

Because it is a world leader in graphics chips and is listed in Toronto, it is less affected.

ATI was founded seventeen years ago (August 20, 1985) by five immigrants: one from South China, three from Hong Kong Island, and one from the Netherlands. However, in the past two years, ATI has been struggling as NVIDIA has been relentlessly closing the gap in market share.

One of the most important reasons for this is that in 97, Intel launched a complete solution that bundled graphics chips, motherboard chipsets, and CPUs, making a high-profile entry into the graphics chip field. ATI also followed suit and proposed to enter the CPU field.

Back in the Intel 486 era, CPUs had a clock speed of 300MHz, while ATI was developing CPU chips with a clock speed of 600MHz.

The result was that both sides compromised. In the following year (98), Intel stopped offering the "complete bundled solution of graphics chip, motherboard chipset, and CPU", and ATI also announced its withdrawal from the CPU research and development field after investing a lot of money.

It was this challenge that, while saving face for ATI, angered Intel, a US company, with its little brother in its backyard not obeying its orders, and led Intel to begin shifting its cooperation orders towards its domestic NVIDIA.

In February 1999, NVIDIA won all the spring orders for Intel Pentium III from major computer OEMs (manufacturers), completely excluding ATI.

In 2000, ATI acquired ArtX, a chip company whose product, the Flipper display chip, was a dedicated chip for Nintendo game consoles.

The acquisition of ArtX chip company marks ATI's entry into the high-end gaming and 3D workstation market.

At this point, ATI and NVIDIA began to have some differences in product details. This difference enabled ATI to regain its lead over NVIDIA in the coming years, despite losing orders from the Intel ecosystem, thanks to the booming global game console market.

However, with the significant improvement in computer performance, the game console market shrank rapidly. Finally, in 06, ATI had to purchase all of its common stock from AMD for $43 billion in cash plus 5800 million AMD common stock, and was thus acquired by AMD.

Currently, there are only three CPU manufacturers in the world: Intel, AMD, and VIA (Via Technologies).

The IC design architecture that VIA obtained was licensed from Intel.

So, in essence, the current global CPU market is a situation of two major players: Intel with a market share of 78%, AMD with 20%, and VIA with 2%.

Having lost Intel's market share, AMD, being an American company, is not exactly a merciful and kind entity either, which essentially blocked ATI's path in the branded PC market.

In this situation, Zhao Chang'an wouldn't even consider ATI, which has a total market value of $100 billion.

In reality, even if Zhao Chang'an intended to invest and hold shares, given the rapid development of Flipper display chips in the game console field over the past two years, they might not necessarily be interested in Zhao Chang'an, the "barbarian" who acquired RIM through opportunistic means.