Why should we pay attention to chips? A new silicon-based civilization will be opened by them

Source: Content from WeChat official account Chips ,Thanks.

There is no growth without reason, just like there is no love or hate without reason. We are experiencing the fastest development in the 70 years since the emergence of mankind, and it will continue to accelerate. Few people reflect on where the power behind such a miracle comes from and where it will take us? Moreover, even fewer people realize that, in units of 10 years, we have reached the intersection of two civilizations.

GDP growth of regional economies from 1 AD to 2000

Before World War II, we were at the peak of carbon-based civilization. All human beings on the planet were carbon carriers, and our energy acquisition depended on the movement and changes of carbon-based molecules/chemical bonds.

Carbohydrates drive the growth of humans and animals, and all things continue to grow;

Carbon-based fuels drive mechanical motion and propel the world forward;

Just as the evolution of organisms is accompanied by death, the evolution of the world is also accompanied by destruction. While 50 million people died in the war, World War II flattened the real world, achieved the goal of overthrowing the old system through physical annihilation, and laid the foundation for the globalization of markets and capital. The arms race gave birth to semiconductor technology and silicon-based civilization, thus forming the three core forces that drive economic progress and dominate the distribution of wealth and power today:

Globalization of the US empire (market expansion);

China joins the world division of labor and completes marketization and capitalization (capital accumulation);

Silicon-based civilization’s overall improvement in productivity (technological progress).

Today, the United States is shrinking, China is aging, and the self-accelerating ability of silicon-based civilization is still increasing. We should realize today:

Silicon-based civilization is the first civilization that can strengthen itself and continue to iterate at an exponential rate (Moore's Law). Carbon-based organisms need hundreds of millions of years of evolution to develop new skills, but individuals in silicon-based civilizations only need a few seconds.

The energy harvesting of silicon-based civilization relies on the migration and change of atoms/electrons, and its efficiency is surpassing that of carbon-based fuels.

Silicon-based civilization may combine energy and computing, and even drive humans to a higher level of evolution, or even replace humans. Silicon-based energy drives computing in all things and pushes the world forward; silicon-based computing gives souls to all things and drives the evolution of all.

Important inventions in human history

We have listed the important inventions in human history in chronological order. Compared with the evolution speed of silicon-based civilization, the evolution speed of carbon-based civilization is ridiculously slow: it took us 1 million years to enter the Bronze Age, but we, in the early days of silicon-based civilization, only need less than 50 years to enter the Space Age. In the future, the computing results contained in every new invention that may appear are almost equal to the sum of all previous scientific and technological achievements.

For all investors, we need to be alert. The real biggest fundamentals we are facing are not the rise of China or the disintegration of the European Union, but the comprehensive transition from carbon-based civilization to silicon-based civilization, with scientific and technological progress becoming the strongest development axis. Countries and organizations are the products of human conflicts and collisions, and their existence is short-lived and tortuous; while silicon-based civilization is the direction of demand and technology resonance, and it is a long-term and irreversible evolution.

Silicon drives the core power of the world's progress: energy and computing

It was expected that the switch to silicon-based civilization would bring about the reconstruction of the entire value system, but the impulsiveness and swiftness of the rich were not anticipated. The first-class tickets for silicon-based civilization are becoming more and more expensive.

Sun Zhenyi saw this, and in 2016, in order to get a ticket to silicon-based civilization, he spent $32.17 billion to acquire ARM (Apple had attempted to acquire it but failed), and at the same time acquired data pipelines Sprint and T-Moible, and at the same time brought in Alibaba to fully deploy IOT (Internet of Things). Alibaba was also voraciously acquiring various chip assets and teams, and quietly.

We anticipate a possible outcome: all the giants that are currently deploying AI, smart driving, electric vehicles, and cloud computing will eventually meet in the chip industry for the ultimate showdown.

Carbon-based civilization's toys VS silicon-based civilization's neuron pricing model is completely reversed

As the core element of silicon-based civilization, the development of the chip industry has not been smooth sailing. 12 years ago, when AMD took the lead in pushing x86 computing to multi-core, the entire industry was excited, but then encountered bottlenecks and confusion. The increasingly powerful computing performance had almost no applications to consume except games.

The excess computing power has led to a classic embarrassment : the CPU developed by top students has to rely on the pricing of poor students who are addicted to games.

At that time, the CPU industry was in a period of overcapacity, just like the overcapacity of steel and coal today. AMD/Intel/Nvidia were all caught in a terrible stock game. At that time, except for the big boss Intel, the stock prices of AMD and Nvidia were very bad. Small manufacturers such as VIA (now HTC's Wang Xuehong's company) were even cleared out. The entire upstream and downstream of the industry chain and the capital market could not see the future clearly.

After all, in the eyes of people in the carbon-based civilization era, is there any difference between a CPU that embodies wisdom and an inflatable doll in economic terms? No, they are both entertainment industries with overcapacity.

Super-large Bitcoin mines and Satoshi Nakamoto

The rise of Bitcoin and cloud services is what really puts a price on computing power. Together, they have told the world the value of computing from two different perspectives: gray and white.

Bitcoin is the most direct. The 100,000-fold increase in 9 years has made the Chinese, who have the most sensitive business sense, the world's largest Bitcoin trading group. My friend specifically looks for pit-mouth power stations and large hydropower stations in Yalong River, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, and sets up computer rooms nearby to mine, just because the electricity price there is cheap, and hundreds of thousands of graphics cards continue to consume a lot of energy and continuously use computing power to produce Bitcoin. This is the computational alchemy of technology enthusiasts .

More IC designers joined in the computational alchemy, pushing the market from GPU mining to ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) mining, which is more efficient and faster, so much so that the computing power of some mines exceeded 51% of the total network. The Silverfish Mine, which once had the largest installed capacity in Asia a few years ago, launched its own Silverfish Blade Miner chip, moving from a gray area Bitcoin service provider to a chip manufacturer. This is a huge innovation in a special era.

Some kind of mining chip

If self-made Bitcoin miners are so eager, wealthy cloud computing companies are even more willing to invest.

In 2016, Amazon added 800,000 servers to its AWS service alone, an average of 2,192 servers and 100 cabinets per day. At least 10 truckloads of hardware are consumed every day, and the actual number of servers it currently owns is between 3 million and 4 million. The huge hardware consumption has even made Amazon want to bring Texas Instruments (NASDAQ: TXN), which has a market value of $80 billion, under its wing in exchange for a ticket to the chip market.

Amazon's James Hamilton shows off his own Annapurna ASIC chip

Chips mean profits. Cloud computing has given a clear equation. In order to further improve the efficiency of cloud computing, Amazon Cloud Services, which has a revenue of more than 10 billion US dollars, acquired a small Israeli chip company and launched the Annapurna ASIC chip specially developed for super large data centers to support network management and computing acceleration. In addition, Amazon uses Broadcom's Tomahawk Ethernet ASIC, which supports 128 ports with a bandwidth of up to 25 Gbps Ethernet, setting a record in the industry and leading the way.

At the same time, in addition to teaming up with AMD, Google also developed its own customized ASIC artificial intelligence chip. Facebook mainly uses GPU to build machine learning. Microsoft uses FPGA (Field Programmable Gating Arrays)-based technology to accelerate cloud servers.

The rise of cloud services has driven the market's demand for chips. All giants have joined the melee in different ways. The wave of AI has pushed the battlefield of all Internet giants into the deepest part of silicon-based civilization - chips.

Whether it is Masayoshi Son or Bezos, giants outside the industry are driving the revaluation of the entire chip market. Each chip is the neuron of society, the smallest unit of cloud services, and the smallest unit of productivity.

The rise of cloud services

Market share of cloud services providers in the third quarter of 2016

Chips are the ultimate battlefield of competition

AI is the "soul" of the product

Energy + Computing = Silicon-based Biology

The future of silicon-based civilization after the singularity is approaching, all industries are chip-driven

Silicon-based civilization has always been unstoppable, but in 2016, Google's AlphaGo crushed our remaining confidence with things we thought were complex. AI has already surpassed humans in the most basic senses and abilities of humans, such as vision, hearing, logic, and learning ability.

Product side: Trillions of products will be AI+, everything will be connected, and chips will be the core driving force

In the cloud: Trillion-level products are connected to cloud computing, and deep learning gives products a "soul"

In fact, what we should worry about or think about more is what will happen if "computing + energy" are unified on a chip? Wouldn't this be a self-driven silicon-based artificial brain?

The wave of IOT is brewing. The Internet of Everything, trillions of devices and objects, will be connected and calculated, and even interactive and endowed with emotions. With such a huge stock of devices, "they" can communicate, chat, and think with each other, and evolve at a speed 10,000 times that of humans. Will they become the ubiquitous "gods" that rule carbon-based organisms? Humans are just a few billion neurons, a gap of 10,000 times, which is extremely small.

AMD Radeon Instinct, born for AI.

The singularity is approaching, and the silicon-based "neuron" characteristics of chip companies are becoming more and more obvious. We dare not think too much. The short-term bubble of AI is already large, but the trend is unstoppable and will change everything, even the most traditional business. Imagine that the pricing of toys in the future is dominated by IQ. What will happen? Other people's excellent products are like souls, a rag doll, a robot dog, just like alive. Your own product is still a cold "object", how much can it sell for?

The approach of the singularity will not reduce the intensity of competition between humans and human enterprises, but will make it more brutal, and those who fall behind will be powerless to resist. In the past, companies competed in scale and parallel competition , with the scale expanding and the cost decreasing. In the future, companies will compete in IQ and gradient competition , which will not only require sufficient computing power to improve R&D, management and platform services, but also strong talents to promote the evolution of product AI.

The evolution of technology is like a turbulent undercurrent. Most companies will be swept away by the times, and most humans will be completely abandoned by the times. We are creating a new world that requires trillions of CPUs and "everything has spirits". We need to comprehensively reevaluate the entire chip industry.

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