Facing such a sudden conference call, Zuo Sicheng and Liu Nian were both stunned. However, they dared not delay Boss Huang's orders. Even though it was past midnight in China, they immediately initiated the conference call.
"Foreigners can't be relied upon; in the future, mobile phones must rely on ourselves!" Boss Huang stated directly and without preamble.
Boss Huang's original plan was to utilize his foresight to acquire Android in advance and then dominate the other half of the mobile operating system market. He even intended to leverage his advantage in understanding mobile phone development trends to release smartphones early, thereby establishing the dominant position of smartphones in the market.
However, after acquiring Android, he discovered that many things could not proceed according to his plan.
It couldn't be said that Android was worse than in the other world. In fact, the Android company in the other world was still struggling with electricity bills at this time... They hadn't been acquired by Google yet, the company had only three or four R&D personnel, and hadn't even developed a semi-finished product; Android was merely a rough concept.
Although progress was much better than in historical records, through this argument with Andy Rubin, Huang He discovered the reason why Android could never achieve an advantage over Apple in terms of operating systems in later life: the company itself had fundamental issues, or Andy Rubin himself had issues, and was unsuitable.
This forced Boss Huang to change his plans and prepare an alternative: to develop a mobile operating system himself.
"Boss, I don't know what went wrong with Android, but I've already tried the prototype and beta version of Android. I believe if we start from scratch to reach Android's current level, it will likely take four to five years and require double the manpower and resources. This is not cost-effective!" Liu Nian, who was in charge of the entire mobile phone business, said sincerely.
He genuinely felt that his boss had become erratic. Developing a mobile operating system essentially meant retracing the path that Android had already taken, which was simply a waste of their own money.
"No, I don't intend to retrace Android's path. Instead, I plan to forge a completely new path! A path no one has ever taken before!" Huang He understood Liu Nian's thoughts. Boss Huang was not that foolish. If he were dissatisfied with Android, he could directly replace Andy Rubin. After all, Boss Huang held absolute control over the Android Group. Although the initial agreement had a requirement not to replace the founder Andy Rubin, if he truly made up his mind, he could easily sideline Andy Rubin.
"A path no one has ever taken before?" Zuo Sicheng pondered for a moment and then said, "Boss, are you planning to build mobile phone chips using ternary gold-rare chips?"
Indeed, Zuo Sicheng was very insightful, instantly guessing Boss Huang's intention. Liu Nian, standing beside him, was startled.
"That's right, that's my plan!" Boss Huang admitted readily, then asked, "What do you think, are there any technical issues?"
"Boss, I've only been in charge for two months, how can I answer technical questions for you!" Zuo Sicheng said with a smile.
"Don't you have any technical intuition!" Huang He chuckled.
"I actually do!" Zuo Sicheng smiled slightly and nodded. "Just yesterday, I completed the initial architecture design for the chip. Although this architecture can only perform the simplest operations and is merely a model to test feasibility and basic data."
"However, the data from this model shows that a five-state gold-rare chip, under the same size and computing power, requires only one-eighth of the energy consumption of a binary chip."
"This means that if you compare a five-state chip and a binary chip of the same computing power, the five-state chip will only consume 1/8 of the electricity of the binary chip. When it operates at full capacity, its temperature will not exceed 50 degrees Celsius... unless the indoor temperature already exceeds 45 degrees."
"Let's put it this way, a 12W power supply is sufficient for the gold-rare chip to operate at full capacity."
"Really? That's fantastic! This way, the biggest issues limiting mobile chips – computing power and power consumption – can all be resolved!" Liu Nian exclaimed excitedly upon hearing this news.
Earlier, Andy Rubin had also complained to Boss Huang that the primary reason for the terrible user experience of the first-generation Android system was insufficient chip computing power.
And the fundamental reason for this insufficient chip computing power was the limitation of energy consumption. Due to the usage scenarios of mobile phones, it was impossible to always carry a hundreds-of-watts power supply. The voltage and current that mobile phone batteries could provide were quite limited, and this electricity also had to be shared with other phone components. Therefore, mobile phone chips had to be designed and used under low power consumption conditions.
Although the current chips produced using architectures provided by Arm, specifically for mobile phones, could greatly improve the ratio of power consumption to computing power, this could not fundamentally change the issue of low computing power resulting from low power consumption. Not to mention that the x60 architecture of computer chips was superior to Arm in terms of both efficiency and complexity.
However, if chips manufactured using gold-rare could operate with just a 12W power supply, such a power supply was achievable with a mobile phone battery. This would allow mobile phone chips to possess computing power comparable to computer chips, effectively solving the biggest problem of mobile computing power.
It was no wonder Liu Nian was so excited to hear this news. Any company involved in smart phones would be incredibly excited by such news.
"In addition to this, I have another idea!" Zuo Sicheng said.
"What idea? Quickly tell me!" Before Boss Huang could speak, Liu Nian eagerly asked.
"That is, I've discovered that all current basic programming languages are not suitable for five-state chips at all. Their level is too low; five-state chips require a more advanced programming language!" Zuo Sicheng continued.
"A more advanced programming language? What does that mean?" Boss Huang asked somewhat blankly. Did programming languages have high and low levels? Weren't they all just strings of code?
"Of course, all current programming languages are designed based on binary computers, so the core logic of their programming is merely the change between 0 and 1. Then, through a series of instruction strings of 1s and 0s, a program is completed."
"Even to create the simplest application, thousands of lines of instructions are needed. For some complex programs, it might require tens of millions of lines."
"But five-state computers are different. Because they can generate five different choices and variations – 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 – programming will no longer be about the changes between 0 and 1, but rather the changes between these five different states."
"To put it simply, one line of code used to control only one change. But now, one line of code can control five different variables."
"But if that's the case, programming languages composed of English words are simply not suitable for programming five-state computers. This is because a single word represents a single meaning, and this meaning is fixed and cannot be extended to more meanings."
"This might be a bit complex to explain. To put it in the simplest terms, the current Oxford English Dictionary has recorded 250,000 English words. If we exclude 20% of the less commonly used English words, the number of commonly used English words reaches 200,000. The reason for this situation is that English words cannot be used in a chained manner. Every time a new thing appears, a new word needs to be invented to describe it. This is why I say it is a very low-level language, very uninteresting."
"Conversely, the most advanced language in the world is Chinese. With 3,000 Chinese characters, 99% of Chinese usage scenarios can be covered. In fact, the most commonly used Chinese characters by Chinese people are only 1,240. The number requirement is only 1% of that of English words."
"Why does this happen?"
"Fundamentally, English is simpler than Chinese characters. If we strip away everything else from English and reduce it to its most basic state, it is just 26 English letters. Everything is born from the arrangement and combination of these 26 English letters."
"And Chinese can be understood as being formed by the arrangement and combination of 3,000 Chinese characters. In fact, Chinese people are very great. If every English speaker's brain is a 26-state computer, then the brain of Chinese speakers is a 3,000-state computer. Isn't that terrifying?"
"This alone can explain why Chinese is the most advanced language in the world."
"Moreover, Chinese is actually a pictographic script. Even if you don't understand Chinese, just by looking at the patterns of Chinese characters, there's a chance you can infer the meaning represented by the Chinese characters."
"If we look at these two languages in terms of computer programming text, the different combinations of 26 English letters can produce 650 different variations."
"But the combination of 3,000 Chinese characters in different ways can produce nearly 9 million different variations."
"More importantly, because English lacks single-word meanings, when two people who have only learned individual English letters and Chinese characters are considered, when two English letters are combined, the English learner will have no idea what those two letters mean."
"For example, 'in'. Suppose you've only learned English letters, can you know the meaning of 'in'?"
"Conversely, if I put the Chinese characters 'gua' and 'zi' together, even if you haven't seen 'guazi' before, you can probably guess that it means 'son of watermelon'."
"Let me give another example. I put 'feng' and 'ma' together, which are absolutely unrelated, forming the word 'fengma'."
"Well, there is definitely no word 'fengma' in Chinese. But at first glance at this word, 90% of Chinese people's first reaction will be that the meaning of 'fengma' refers to a horse that runs as fast as the wind."
"Without any explanation or prior communication, all Chinese people seeing this word can make the same judgment and understanding in a short period of time. This is the greatness of Chinese."
"And this is what I want to do. I believe there is no language more suitable for five-state computers than Chinese. Five-state computers should naturally use the more advanced Chinese as their programming language!" Zuo Sicheng said finally.