Liang Meng Song ... the most understanding of TSMC, MediaTek ASIC into the Ali smart speakers

1. Qualcomm CEO: China will be from 'manufacturing power' into 'innovation power'; 2. Liang Meng Song ... the most understanding of TSMC people; 3. MediaTek ASIC chip into Alibaba smart speakers; 4. Crystal Hao Branch is expected As the mainland OLED panel main NOR Flash suppliers; 5.NVMe SSD performance / power / cost to improve the overall operation of the server faster and more stable

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1. QUALCOMM CEO: China will change from 'manufacturing power' to 'innovation power';

Editor's Note: Before the Ninth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, China Daily interviewed business leaders from leading multinational companies to understand their views on China's economic development and global contribution.

Steve Morlenkov is the chief executive officer of Qualcomm, a multinational semiconductor and telecom group based in the United States.

Q: Which three words would you use to describe China today?

Morlenkov: Innovation, Collaboration, Green.

Innovation - Global consensus increasingly argues that innovation drives are a necessary condition for sustainable economic growth in the world, and the Chinese government has repeatedly reaffirmed that innovation is the main driver of development.

Synergy - China is struggling to integrate into the global innovation network while coordinating its optimal allocation of resources, and QUALCOMM is pleased with the global goal of China's smart equipment manufacturers and seeing them succeed overseas.

Green - In recent years, the government has also attached great importance to ecological protection. During my visit to China, China has made great efforts to improve the environment.

Q: What is the biggest challenge facing China?

Molenkov: All countries and economies, including China, are faced with the challenge of maintaining innovation, for example, entrepreneurs are investing heavily in research and development, and innovation is hampered if R & D is not rewarded.

We need an incentive mechanism that enables innovators to invest boldly and openly. A good policy structure and framework, including measures to protect intellectual property, will motivate innovators and entrepreneurs.

In the past five years, the government has increased the protection of intellectual property rights, innovators are more convinced that their invention if the market is successful, will be protected and rewarded.

Q: As a Fortune 500 company, what sectors do you think of the development opportunities?

The next generation of technology, the 5G technology, will be widely used in almost all industry sectors and will redefine working procedures and rewrite the rules of economic success, which will play a vital role in the whole industry. An independent research report called "5G Economy" is funded by Qualcomm, which states that by the end of 2035, $ ​​12.3 trillion in global economic output will come from 5G technology.

Another area of ​​hope is automotive networking, which is expected to increase productivity and sales and improve the user experience and environmental quality, and it will also reduce traffic problems and mortality, and we recently acquired NXP Semiconductors as a strategy for our entry into the field Part of it.

Q: What factors will drive China's economic growth?

Molenkov: Chinese companies are involved in 5G technology, artificial intelligence, Internet of things, large data, integrated circuits, robotics, virtual reality and enhance the reality and other fields.

In the next few years, these areas will be the engine of innovation and drive economic growth, and I am pleased to see that QUALCOMM is working closely with Chinese companies in these areas.

Q: What is the opportunity for the 'One Way' initiative to bring China and the world?

Molenkov: Information interconnection is not only the basis, but also the 'area along the way' initiative of the important issues, which promoted the Chinese telecommunications companies 'going out' strategy.

2016, we set up a Shenzhen Innovation Center to support the overseas development of Chinese domestic manufacturers.China companies will be their own efforts and Qualcomm's technical support combined in the overseas expansion of fruitful.

Our footprints are distributed throughout China, including the server chip joint venture in Guizhou Province and the joint venture of Chongqing, where we have test equipment in Shanghai, an innovation center in Shenzhen, and a branch in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province This has laid the groundwork for us to support the 'One Way' initiative.

Q: What is China's most innovative product?

Molenkov: There are many, such as high-speed rail, mobile payment, shared bikes and online shopping. These are changing people's lives in China, the way the work of the latter three are driven by wireless connection technology, which is not surprising The

For Qualcomm, we have joined hands with China Mobile and the motorbike, using our leading Internet of Things and mobile security technology to support the sharing of bicycles.

We also work with Chinese companies such as millet to make smart phones use 'high-speed rail mode', which guarantees travelers a stable signal and Internet access.

Q: China is known as the manufacturing power, what will become the future of China's new 'business card'?

In the long run, China will change from 'manufacturing power' to 'innovation power'. The next generation of network technology, artificial intelligence, networking, large data and intelligent equipment will be the driving force behind this change The

China's economy will benefit more from the promotion of smart and high-end manufacturing.

In fact, in order to promote innovation in these areas, we are working closely with Chinese partners.

2. Liang Mengsong ... the most understanding of TSMC people;

(16) announced yesterday, the former TSMC into the Samsung R & D generals Liang Mengsong and Zhao Haijun as co-chief executive, which is presided over the front of the co-founder of the co-operation of one of Jiang Shangyi transferred to the core After the independent directors, together with the core in the 14-nanometer process to catch up with the progress of TSMC's heavy responsibility.

Liang Mengsong fought in the core as executive director and co-executive, as early as May this year, the uproar, but SMIC rare in the official website to clarify and now confirmed with Zhao Haijun as co-chief executive, selected 30 anniversary of TSMC released this high-order Personnel case, it seems that for the TSMC plant in Nanjing began to install 16-nanometer process machine to fight back.

For Liang Mengsong as SMIC CEO, TSMC not much to comment, emphasizing TSMC in mainland China's foundry will assist the mainland wafer foundry industry upgrade, meaningful.

It is understood that Jiang Shangyi earlier agreed to SMIC as an independent international director, TSMC has said that Jiang Shangyi has previously informed Zhang Zhongmou, its main responsibility is corporate governance, I believe will not make damage to TSMC interests.

However, the Liang Mengsong again by the Samsung job-hopping in the core, and selected in the 30 anniversary of TSMC before the Buda, and TSMC each other signs of concentration.

Liang Mengsong has been working in TSMC since 1981 and was the number one R & D warfare of TSMC's advanced process. He has been involved in the research and development work of TSMC every generation. 12 years ago, TSMC developed 0.13 micron "copper process", defeated IBM, , Liang Meng Song contributed

In 2009, Liang Mengsong left TSMC in the coming year, and in the coming year, he came to Korea Sungkyunkwan University, which was sponsored by South Korea. In February 2011, after his expiry of his prohibition period, he paid TSMC to comply with this exceeding $ 46 million Dividend, the same year in July changed to Samsung wafer foundry technology. Economic Daily

3. MediaTek ASIC chip into Alibaba smart speakers;

In addition, Alibaba's cloud company Ali cloud is now the layout of the artificial intelligence products, will also use MediaTek ASIC network chip. In addition, Alibaba will be released next year, the new smart speaker, will use MediaTek ASIC chip;

Alibaba is currently in the electricity business, AI, new retail and smart home and other markets booming, the goal is to catch up with Amazon, becoming the world's largest cloud faucet. Amazon is currently mainly by artificial intelligence voice assistant Alexa, to expand the smart home products , Such as Echo, Echo Dot and Echo Spot and other products, and then layout to the smart car, uninhabited shops and other markets.Alibaba is the development of the voice assistant platform AliGenie, to the whole Chinese dialogue, the first product is the corresponding smart speaker lamb Elf X1, now Alibaba plans to smart speakers into the hotel, build smart rooms, the future will enter the aviation and new retail industry.

Alibaba plans to publish in the middle of November the new smart speaker products, which will use MediaTek ASIC chip, as a voice recognition device computing chip, which is following the days of the cat Wizard X1, Alibaba's second smart speaker into the MediaTek chip The product.

Not only that, Ali cloud is now actively layout AI market, in addition to previously announced cooperation with Xilinx FPGA, Ali cloud will use MediaTek ASIC chip, as a network chip, and the cooperation has been reported for six months, In the near future the two sides may announce the cooperation case.

In fact, MediaTek as early as the second half of this year came its network chip into the equipment manufacturers Cisco, and even the next stage is expected to snatch network equipment manufacturers Juniper orders, behind the biggest contributor is MediaTek holds 75% of the subsidiary Qing Communication, as the key to win the Ali cloud orders.

4. Crystal Hao Branch is expected to become the mainland OLED panel main NOR Flash suppliers;

Thanks to the smartphone market, the arrival of the traditional peak season, mobile DRAM demand is booming, the fourth quarter price increase of 10 to 15%, is expected to drive the memory multi-chip module (MCP) prices rose simultaneously, and then, BOE and other panel factory Production of OLED panels, will drive NOR Flash demand to enhance the crystal Haoke benefit from the Mobile DRAM and NOR Flash shipping boom, September revenue growth, the fourth quarter operating performance is expected to Wang Wan.

Jing Hao Branch benefited from niche and mobile DRAM, MCP, NOR Flash and other shipments and prices rose in September consolidated revenue rose 31.9% to NT $ 977 million, up 20.9% over the same period last year, Jing Hao Branch in the third quarter consolidated revenue growth of 1.3% to NT $ 2,545,000,000, compared with the same period last year grew 3.7%, operating performance was robust. Accumulated the first 9 months of this year combined revenue of NT 7.717 billion yuan, the annual growth rate of 17.3% better than market expectations.

(DRAMeXchange) pointed out that the smart phone market by the traditional season driven by increased demand, as well as mainstream suppliers interested in improving the price of mobile DRAM, the fourth quarter of mobile DRAM rose on average fell 10 to 15% For the DRAM market specifications of the product or the highest, since the beginning of 2017 since the beginning of the average DRAM unit operating price is lower than the standard DRAM situation.

Moreover, because the three major DRAM factory in 2018 will not have a substantial expansion plan, mainly for the existing plant capacity optimization, and through the process upgrade to increase output in the case of limited production capacity is limited, estimated 2018 The DRAM industry in the first quarter of next year, although the DRAM market downturn, the situation will be more than the fourth quarter soothing, but the price performance is not high on the chances of demand, the low-end smart phone Hardware upgrades, will continue to drive mobile DRAM growth.

According to the legal person pointed out that the Korean DRAM factory will be mobile DRAM production capacity into LPDDR4, but consumer electronics products have begun to use a large number of LPDDR2 / 3 and MCP program, Jing Hao Branch LPDDR2 / 3 and MCP shipments significantly improved, Huawei, Lenovo, Haier and other mainland system manufacturers 4K TV, digital machine box, mobile network card and other supply chain, due to carrying capacity to enhance and smooth prices, Jing Hao Branch operation is not bearish in the fourth quarter.

In addition, Crystal Hao Branch in the smooth acquisition of Yiyang last year, made NOR Flash product line and silicon intellectual property, due to the second half of the NOR Flash market shortage and the price rose, Jing Hao Branch so directly benefit. Industry pointed out that although the current Global OLED panel is almost only a supplier of Samsung, but the mainland panel plant has been fully rushed, BOE October will begin mass production OLED panel and supply Huawei, Jing Hao Branch is expected to become the mainland OLED panel main NOR Flash suppliers.

5.NVMe SSD performance / power / cost to improve the overall operation of the server faster and more stable

Data center business is booming, the data center is bound to catch up with this trend.To this end, the data center is through 40Gigabit Ethernet and multi-core server technology to reduce the delay rate, the simplest way is from the server's direct connection storage Device - traditional hard disk (HDD) - the turntable to proceed.

However, solid-state drives (SSDs) gradually replace HDDs to improve server input / output operations (IOPS) per second. Any storage platform can significantly improve application performance with SSDs; directly connected to the server PCIe interface via NVMe specification , The performance is even more potential.

NVMe is a storage protocol standard designed to allow storage input / output (I / O) to be as close as possible to the system processor for faster IOPS performance and lower average latency. With NVMe SSD, The IT team can meet the needs of applications, users and management with low latency, high IOPS performance, scalable capacity and other common support, as well as devices that support hot-plugging and hot additions, real-time replacement or expansion.

IOPS performance / reliability both NVMe SSD development full of energy

At present, SSD has three host-to-drive interfaces: SATA, SAS and PCIe. SATA SSD and SAS SSD require a host bus adapter card (HBA), which is usually connected to the server board's chipset Integrated, or PCIe port expansion card. The host operating system is responsible for controlling SATA or SAS HBA, to help communicate with other computing architecture.

All SSD types are superior to IOPS for traditional HDDs, but are likely to be affected by external conditions such as operating system (OS), drive stack, and low performance due to communication protocols (Note: SATA and SAS require protocol communication , In order to obtain data from the host system and sent to the storage device, and then reverse back).

NVMe SSDs do not have to be implemented as a harder IOPS than SATA SSDs, SAS SSDs, and their HBAs, and we are able to implement this more direct connection with NVMe's protocol benefits When combined, naturally can greatly enhance the efficiency of IOPS.

Figure 1 shows the 4KiB random read IOPS performance comparison for Micron's three high-performance SSD products (9100 PRO NVMe, S610DC SAS, 5100 ECO SATA), and an efficiency level SAS HDD product (15,000 RPM) NVMe SSD, SAS SSD, SATA SSD, and SAS HDD from top to bottom.

Figure 1 each type of hard disk 4K read IOPS performance

PCIe NVMe SSD, SAS SSD and SATA SSD data are taken from the Micron SSD specification sheet (different capacity and version, performance is also different), SAS HDD performance by the Micron laboratory SNIA Performance Test Specification (SNIA Performance Test Specification) Enterprise 1.1 Version of the IOPS test (HDD specification table usually does not contain 4K random read IOPS values).

As shown in Figure 1: PCIe NVMe SSD to 700,000 IOPS 4K random read IOPS performance first; SAS SSD and SATA SSD were 190,000 times IOPS and 93,000 times IOPS ranked second and third; SAS HDD test Very low value, almost difficult to identify.

Speed ​​performance can be transformed into a considerable performance advantages to meet the cloud and data center servers, on-demand video, virtual applications such as the need for fast response to the I / O intensive workload.

Although the PCIe NVMe SSD read IOPS performance is much faster than other types of SSD, it is much higher than the HDD, but the speed is not enough to constitute the replacement of the reasons. After all, if poor maintenance, in order to replace the hard disk or increase capacity , IT staff can not afford to shut down the server caused by the loss, no matter how amazing IOPS also does not help.

In view of this, reliability, availability and maintainability must be outstanding performance, with superior performance, hot-swappable, easy access to the SSD is the best choice.Equers can be exempted from increasing capacity or replace the hard drive, and You must shut down the server and open the case.

NVMe SSD has all of the above features. With the 2.5-inch PCIe SSD standard specification (also known as U.2) is increasingly popular, IT staff can continue to enjoy the SAS SSD and SATA SSD with the same high degree of flexibility, with NVMe all If you do not have to shut down the server can be hot and hot new (in order to replace the hard drive or increase capacity), has become a prerequisite for today's PCIe NVMe SSD.

NVMe SSD quality increase in the amount of construction costs do not increase the reverse

As more and more servers use NVMe SSDs, application performance and data throughput can be reduced to better-performing NVMe SSDs due to harsh workloads (high core count and larger memory capacity) For example, a virtual desktop image store that serves a large number of virtual desktop users must support a large number of small, random IOPS (Virtual Desktop Image (VDI) is a typical small, random IO file, highly dependent on reading efficacy).

According to VMware's "Virtual Desktop Architecture Window 7 Desktop Server and Storage Size Guide" report, 17 to 25 IOPS sessions are required for each heavy user, while Atlantis Computing's "Windows 7 IOPS: Deep Drive for Virtual Desktop Image" report , This number is as high as 25 to 50. With each user 25 times IOPS as the base, calculate the number of different types of hard disk required, which will require several HDD to disperse the workload.I suppose we want to service the heavy user has 500 , We need at least 25 SAS HDDs, but only one SSD (the lowest number of deployable) is available. See Figure 2 for a comparison.

Figure 2 supports 500 Window 7 heavy users the number of hard drives required

Based on the powerful performance benefits of NVMe SSD, the number of SSDs required is much lower than that of HDDs, allowing the same number of users to access the image; in addition to groundbreaking performance, PCIe NVMe SSD offers higher cost performance, higher initial purchase costs , In the long run can save costs.

When the pursuit of efficiency has become the main driving force, the unit cost per IOPS has become the factor of consideration.This indicator shows the SSD implementation of the best work to provide the value: fast storage and transmission of data to the application of which can be found from the initial investment costs Misleading, because the unit cost per gigabyte is not included in the performance of the advantages.

With Google Shopping search results, we can obtain the average of the first three open prices of the test set and calculate the unit's performance for each device performing the same work (using the 4K random IOPS example in Figure 1). The same four hard disks (three SSDs and one HDD) perform the 4KiB 100% IOPS read test (for example, the previously mentioned virtual desktop image store), resulting in a comparison of the unit IOPS performance.

Figure 3 4K random read unit IOPS performance

The value in Figure 3 is calculated based on the number of times IOPS reads 4KiB for each test hard disk (Figure 1), divided by the average of the first three open prices obtained from Google Shopping. IOPS performance. Please note that this is a calculation example - if the transfer data size and read / write ratio changes, the test results will be different; if the device price change is no different.

High-performance low-power NVMe SSD lighting server applications

Power consumption is also the focus of the choice of hard disk type. NVMe SSD maximum power load of 25 watts, 15,000 RPM HDD10 was 7.2 watts, not to mention a single NVMe SSD can replace many HDDs to carry 25 HDD virtual desktop image server For example, the average power consumption of these hard drives is 180 watts; if the array is larger, such as 50 HDDs, power consumption will be nearly 360 watts; assuming extended to 100 HDD, power consumption will increase to about 720 watts. For such a storage platform, the use of NVMe SSD can significantly reduce the consumption of electricity.

In general, NVMe SSD can achieve one or a few more HDDs in terms of performance, resulting in a significant increase in unit IOPS performance and more power saving; NVMe SSD can help IT staff To ensure the smooth operation of the combination of these advantages to save the cost, upgrade to PCIe NVMe SSD can greatly offset the purchase cost.

(The author of the Micron Storage Business Unit senior technical marketing engineer) new electronics

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