Looking back over the past decade, the number of enterprises above designated size in my country's consumer goods industry has increased by 23.7%, operating income has increased by 35%, there are 150 consumer goods enterprises with a scale of over 10 billion yuan, and the export volume of light industry and textiles accounts for more than 30% of the world's total.

As a key industry supporting the "consumption" carriage among the troika of China's economy, the consumer goods industry has developed rapidly in the past decade. With the awakening of local consciousness in recent years, young consumers have become more interested in national fashion brands. The acceptance and love are increasing day by day, and the national trend is once again sweeping the land of China.

On July 2, 2022, the five departments of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Commerce, the Food and Drug Administration, the Intellectual Property Office, and the State Administration for Market Regulation jointly issued the "Action Plan to Support the "Three Products" of the Consumer Goods Industry through Digitalization (2022-2025)" . "It is specifically pointed out that it is necessary to encourage the innovation of national fashion brands and promote the construction of national fashion brands.

01

The new national trend requires new infrastructure

Different from the previous "old infrastructure", in recent years, the new infrastructure composed of emerging technologies such as big data centers, artificial intelligence, and industrial Internet has become the technological foundation supporting digital China.

Digital China needs a technical base, and the digital national trend also needs new infrastructure as technical support. Zhang Yu summarized the digital upgrading of the manufacturing industry behind the digital national trend as manufacturing flexibility. Different from the traditional model that relies on large-scale production to reduce the production cost of a single product, the current strong user demand for personalization requires that the manufacturing process can be flexibly configured, and flexible manufacturing realizes such capabilities.

However, it is not easy to realize flexible manufacturing. It requires the company to realize a closed-loop system throughout the entire link including data collection, production line deployment, logistics management, and even sales. As a global technology enabler, Intel has profound technology accumulation in the field of intelligent manufacturing. Zhang Yu pointed out, "The entire closed loop of flexible manufacturing involves many technologies. Intel is a technology company, and our products cover exactly communication, computing, and connection." In all aspects, for example, our third-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors not only provide powerful computing power, but also support the AVX-512 and DL Boost instruction sets, which can specifically accelerate artificial intelligence workloads.”

In addition, OpenVINO, created by Intel, is an open source tool platform for optimizing and deploying artificial intelligence. It can use models trained in popular frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch to improve the deep learning performance of computer vision, intelligent speech recognition, natural language processing and other common tasks. It can not only reduce enterprise resource requirements, but also achieve efficient deployment on a range of Intel platforms from edge to cloud.

A leading domestic semiconductor display product company has introduced the third generation Intel® Intel's solid-state drive products improve data transfer performance and enable the AI ​​defect detection system based on cloud-edge collaboration to achieve accuracy and efficiency that was previously difficult to achieve with manual inspection. Such technology is now being rapidly deployed and deployed in various factories of the company.

It is not uncommon for Chinese companies like this leading semiconductor display product company to introduce edge computing capabilities through international cooperation to achieve smart manufacturing. The new national trend also requires strong support from global technology suppliers. However, Zhang Nan specifically pointed out, "We believe that the most important thing about the national trend is localization."

As one of the earliest global companies to enter China, HPE has always adhered to the concept of "in China, for China" and established factories and R&D centers in China very early. In addition to the HPE-branded products currently on sale in China, it is also developing and producing localized products and selling local brand products through H3C.

As the technical director of HPE China over the years, Zhang Nan has witnessed the entire process of HPE taking root in China and integrating into the new national trend. One of the things that impressed Zhang Nan the most is: a new employee in 2021 At the farewell party on the day of retirement, the global product VP of HPE, who had worked for 40 years, specifically mentioned "Thank you HPE China".

This story originated from a terminal storage product developed by HPE a few years ago. At that time, HPE originally planned only two product models for this product. “After discovering that neither model met the needs of the Chinese market, we We had timely communication with the VP at that time, hoping to customize a product for the Chinese market that better meets the needs of the Chinese market." Such demand finally received the support of the VP. In the early days of product launch, HPE's R&D team developed a customized product specifically for the Chinese market - "3PAR". This product became a big seller in China as soon as it was launched. HPE then promoted this product to the global market. According to later IDC statistics, this product has maintained the number one sales position of a single model in the following years.

Zhang Nan was quite emotional about this, "We not only made a Chinese fashion brand, but also influenced the world's fashion brands through Chinese fashion brands."

The impact of the personalized demands of the new national trend on the manufacturing industry goes far beyond the product production and manufacturing links. It is also necessary to improve the efficiency of product production testing and verification. Therefore, Wang Shuo summarized the digital upgrade of the manufacturing industry behind the digital national trend into two aspects: "data-driven" and "combination of virtual and real" . "The digitalization of national trend brands must first optimize the process in the production and manufacturing links, and transform the labor-intensive production mode into a digital production mode. In this process, a large number of tests and verifications are required in a virtual environment through digital drive, and the actual production test links are replaced by virtualization."

One obvious benefit of bringing simulation to the manufacturing process is speed. Work that previously needed to be brought to the actual production stage for verification can now be quickly verified by simply conducting simulation tests in a virtual environment, which allows us to calmly respond to the endless stream of personalized needs that emerge with the new national trend.

02

New national trends require new factories

The personalized needs and customized products in the new national trend not only put forward higher requirements for infrastructure, but also force traditional factories to undergo digital upgrades. Computing power enters the factory, and edge computing and digital twins become the key components of digital factories. Two of the hottest technologies.

As a digital factory that carries the entire chain of production and manufacturing, it generates massive amounts of data at the PB level (1PB=1024TB) every day. If all this data is uploaded to the cloud for storage and calculation, both the network latency and the resources consumed in transmission are difficult for current enterprises to bear. Zhang Yu used AI quality inspection as an example to explain, "When picking workpieces in the factory, if the data of defective workpieces on the production line is uploaded to the cloud for analysis, and the results are transmitted to the front end of the system to control the robotic arm for workpiece picking, the production line may have gone through several processes at this time."

The emergence of edge computing just meets the digital factory's many needs for low latency, certainty, resource allocation, etc. A high-performance CNC system independently developed by a domestic high-tech enterprise in the field of R&D and manufacturing of precision CNC machine tools is able to achieve a programming resolution of 0.1 μm precisely because it uses Intel's high-performance processor that introduces timing coordinated computing (TCC) for edge computing. and control resolution accuracy.

With the wave of enterprise digital transformation, many enterprises are now actively pursuing digital transformation. Although the value of edge computing in CNC systems is huge, it is relatively obscure. A more intuitive example is HPE’s edge computing for the catering industry. Empowerment. Zhang Nan said, "A few years ago, we developed a converged device "HPE Edgeline" that integrates storage, network, and computing based on Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors . Its advantage is that it can To cope with harsh environments such as high temperature, high pressure, and high oil pollution, some of our catering customers even put it directly in the kitchen during their digital transformation. "

If edge computing products such as HPE Edgeline are applied to the digital transformation of national trend brands, it actually only solves the needs of the initial business transformation. To take into account the entire life cycle of the enterprise's digital transformation, the problem of later maintenance must be considered. Based on such needs, the HPE R&D team further developed InfoSight, an artificial intelligence platform for remote maintenance. Zhang Nan was also deeply impressed by this product, "This product allows customers to automatically perform remote maintenance and management without human supervision, and some problems have even been automatically solved by the system before customers have even discovered them."

Edge computing plays a role in the new national trend, just like the steam engine driving the giant train of the first industrial revolution forward. After computing power enters the factory through this model, another technology also begins to have a profound impact on the digital transformation of national trend brands. This technology is digital twin . Wang Shuo believes that "digital twin is a concept between the current software simulation and the future metaverse. The simulation may only imitate one component, and the digital twin brings the entire system into the digital space for operation."

03

The new national trend needs new colleagues

The newly upgraded back-end infrastructure, the digitization of mid-end factories, and the new model of digital people on the front end help New Guochao participate in the retail link in a new form, forming a new "people-goods-market" today.

Although digital humans are a brand new concept, they have been widely used in previous animation production. Now these digital humans are once again appearing as new colleagues in various application scenarios of the new national trend. Wang Shuo said, "The digital humans we see in live broadcasts are basically built based on game engines, and game engines are the core business of Unity."

However, the basic technical architecture behind digital humans is still composed of data collection, data analysis, data storage, data calculation and control, and still requires infrastructure such as the third-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor and HPE GreenLake as a Service to provide powerful computing power and cloud service capabilities.

Intel has a lot of experience in the field of digital humans. 3DAT based on the third-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor is a set of technical solutions launched by Intel for 3D motion capture. This technology realizes the perfect integration of machine vision and artificial intelligence. It can extract the 3D bone information of the test subject with low latency and high precision to generate a digital human. More importantly, 3DAT can also be applied to the training process of professional athletes, helping skiers and skateboarders to continuously improve their performance.

In fact, Intel 3DAT has also been applied to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. Zhang Yu said, "In the two programs "Salute to the People" and "Snowflakes" at the opening ceremony of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, we used 3DAT technology to analyze The location of the actors in the entire venue is analyzed, and these locations are then rendered in real time to form a beautiful group on the large screen laid on the ground, thus presenting a beautiful viewing effect.”

As an important global supplier in the field of cloud services, HPE has been advocating "everything as a service" since it proposed to transform into a service-oriented company in 2019, and "everything as a service" has become the theme of the current era. Zhang Nan said, "In the digital age, with the increasing demand for digital people, we see more and more users putting forward higher requirements for IT infrastructure operation and management. HPE launched the GreenLake as a service model three years ago. This fast delivery, flexible deployment, and pay-as-you-go service model can help enterprises focus on business development and enjoy more convenient cloud services in digital transformation."

Zenseact is a subsidiary of Volvo Car Group. In order to further improve the safety of autonomous driving, it is necessary to collect vehicle operation data not only from road test vehicles, but also from mass-produced vehicles. After using HPE GreenLake as a Service in 2021, the company's IT operation and maintenance has become simpler and the overall operating costs have been reduced by 30%.

Zhang Nan explained, “In the past, when customers deployed private clouds, they needed to deploy a lot of IT equipment in the computer room. Enterprises not only required higher energy consumption and produced more carbon emissions, but also required more operation and maintenance personnel. HPE GreenLake is a service The model allows enterprises to pay monthly like using public cloud services, and can also adjust IT needs according to business changes, and keep all data in their own hands. Such cloud services are also more in line with the current application trends of the new country. "

The new national trend requires new infrastructure, new factories, and "new colleagues." Behind this, the most essential thing is the powerful computing power support provided by the third-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and HPE GreenLake IT basic support provided by flexible cloud services such as as-a-service.

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