Location: Architecture workshop and R&D laboratories, Meudon Campus"la Souche".
Date: 23 April 1997, morning.
Point of view: Lazare Bonaparte and Karim Belkacem.
Under the soft green fringes of the Meudon State forest, the morning of 23 April 1997 had the clear freshness of the fine spring days, but inside the brick and glass pavilions of"la Souche", the hive was buzzing like an armistice watch.
That morning, in all the capitals of Europe and Asia, logistics trucks officially delivered to wholesalers and specialist shops the material couple that ran four years of reign without sharing: the VESLA-III 2490 processor, internally called"Swan", and the VFX-250 graphic card.
On the first floor of Pavilion B, with eyes reddened by 36 hours of compilation, but with a smile to the lips, Karim Belkacem had just signed the right to draw digitally from the VoltaOS 4.0 update. Around him, system engineers applauded half-voiced not to wake those who slept on the couches in the hallway.
The tour de force had been harsh: the VESLA 2490 was set at four hundred megahertz thanks to the copper interconnections of zero point eighteen micrometres melted by René Castella in Strasbourg, performing four lines of simultaneous instructions on one physical heart.
Forty-eight hours earlier, a last-minute bug, the material erratum V3E-009, had almost hit the multiplexer of the floating point unit when two heavy division or square root instructions appeared at the same cycle on secondary threads.
Karim had solved the puzzle in the night by rewriting the scheduler in constant time of the kernel to group the processes in symmetrical pairs over the one hundred and twenty-eight kilobytes of first-level cache, while forcing the compiler to slide an invisible white instruction in front of the conflicting calls.
On the graphic side, the VFX-250 permanently buried the youth defects of the first generation VRX-150: the thermal erratum SG4-002, which derived the clock from the display converter beyond eighty-five degrees in very high resolution, as well as the flickering of anisotropic filtering on non-standardized textures, had been swept away by a new silicon trace and dynamic frequency management controlled by the B3D 2.0 interface.
With an additional thirty percent geometric power, the map overcame everything California was trying hard to align.
Even on the Volta Secure side, where Commander Vauquelin and Marc's analysts had intercepted at dawn an attempt at American intrusion by rebound from Delaware on the Frankfurt node, the patches of the TCP/IP network pile encrypted under CENTURION had closed the breach without a noise.
However, when Karim crossed the wooded bridge leading to the top floor of Pavilion A to announce to Lazare that the global deployment had gone smoothly, he did not find his friend in front of the commercial tracking screens.
The door of the architecture workshop, a large clear room under apparent structure that smelled cedar wood, milled paper and chalk, was closed.
Lazare stood in front of a three-metre-wide inclined light table surrounded by four high-resolution workstations operating in parallel. In the arms of a shirt, a pencil holder stuck behind the ear, he drew by hand a clock routing diagram with the peaceful concentration of a master glassmaker drawing a rosette.
Here applied the invisible boundary that all Meudon respected: if Karim reigned over software architecture and ensured with René Castella the lithographic translation of masks for the clean rooms of Alsace, Lazare, and Lazare alone, conceived the logical architecture of VESLA processors. No committee, no working group touched on the fundamental drawing of the heart.
"Tell me at least that you opened a bottle of gas water for the exit of 2490, launched Karim leaning against the cambranle, his arms crossed. The entire specialized press from Tokyo to Berlin is dipping on our four hundred megahertz copper, and the boss is already scrubbing layer paper."
Lazare raised his head and a bright smile, free of all fatigue, lit his face.
"I was waiting for you to finish martyring your system engineers to go to lunch, Karim,"he replied, placing his pencil. Bravo for the software bypass of the V3E-009, by the way. I read your patch at six this morning: grouping the threads together in pairs to amortize the penalty under zero point eight percent is haute couture."
Karim approached the light table, flattered despite him, before his gaze fell on the vector diagrams displayed on the four giant monitors.
The technical director's smile suddenly faded. He leaned forward, laying his two palms on the oak edge, and bent his eyes.
At the top of the logical door matrix was a nomenclature that no engineer outside this room had yet seen in its final version: VESLA-IV 3190, 64-bit native architecture (VESLav4).
"Lazare..."blew Karim with his finger on the registers and decoding units. Have you already closed the full registry level? Sixty-four sixty-four-bit general registries, a 14-story out-of-order pipeline and eight superscalar runs per cycle?"
"And sixteen dedicated vector registers of one hundred twenty-eight bits per thread for the set of instructions Volta SIMD, completed Lazare with the quiet greed of a watchmaker showing his most beautiful movement.
Look at the bottom of the die: I integrated directly on silicon the Gigabit network controller and, above all, the dual channel memory controller to drive the future deep trench DDR memory of Ilya Volkov without intermediate. More external north bridge that strangles the processor."
Karim remained silent ten good seconds, his brain calculating the dizzying abyss that separated this plan from all that existed on earth in April 1997.
"But... to pass a dual DDR memory channel and such a power supply,"Karim said aloud,"the current broach will never hold. You need at least six hundred or seven hundred contacts under the chip."
"Seventy fifty-four contacts exactly,"confirmed Lazare. Socket B6."
Karim stood up suddenly and stared at his friend.
"You give up retrocompatibility with Socket V? Lazare, our general public fortune rests on the fact that any student or accountant can drag a new processor into his old Compaq AXIOM of 1993!
That's why the 2490 is going to sell in millions this summer! If you impose the B6 Socket and the native 64-bit next year, you force the entire planet to change motherboard, memory and power!"
Lazare was attached to the drawing table, crossing his arms with a sovereign calm. Through the open window the singing of the merles entered the oaks of Meudon and the scent of grass cut.
"That is precisely why the 2490 is called"Swan", Karim, explained Lazare in a voice posed. The song of the 32-bit swan and the Socket V. We fired until the last drop of blood from this architecture. But think about what is happening right now in Santa Clara and Redmond."
Lazare designated the wall map of the semiconductors.
"Andy Grove and Bill Gates received $18 billion in federal aid in disguise. They're not stupid or penguins.
By the end of the summer or September, Intel will release a 32-bit overdoped processor, even dissipating fifty or sixty watts like a toaster, and Microsoft will finally deliver a clean Windows from its old DOS slags. They will copy our universal connector model and break their prices to try to take us back to our own land."
A malicious smile passed into Lazare' dark eyes.
"If they attack us on 32 bits this fall and we try to answer them by DIYing a VESLA-III at four hundred and fifty megahertz, we accept their trench war. While with the VESLA-IV 64 bits on Socket B6 and the CELLA-M3 memory of Volkov, in spring 1998, we blow up the bridge behind us.
At the exact moment when America will cry out for victory by believing that it has caught us in the old world, it will discover that we have already moved the entire European and Asian ecosystem in the next century.
As for the existing 32-bit software, I wired a transparent emulation hardware decoder directly into the front-end: with your Volta CC 5.0 compiler, the loss will be less than three percent."
Karim contemplated the pattern of VESLA-IV, then shook his head and let a laugh of unbelieving admiration escape.
"The policy of burned earth applied to our own records,"said the Technical Director. You're completely crazy, Lazare, but God, this pattern is beautiful."
"And he will be even more beautiful with a full belly,"smiled Lazare, giving him a friendly slap on his shoulder. Come on. If we arrive after noon and quarter, Minh will have already eaten all Bernard's blanquette."
At the"La Souche", the canteen on the ground floor had nothing of the aseptic business refectories where plastic trays were lined under blafard neons.
As soon as the Meudon site was purchased in 1990, Lazare had the partitions cut down to open a large wooded room giving one level on a terrace lined with beech trees, and he had debauched a Norman chef, Bernard, with an unchanging instruction:"Well-fed people think better."
At 12:20 p.m. the comforting smell of red veal simmered with white wine, fresh Paris mushrooms and leaven bread just out of the oven made all the thermodynamic equations on campus forget.
Around the long tables of massive oak, Russian physicists of the Volkov team, young polytechnicians in pull-over and veterans of the street of Alésia discussed with animation in a joyful tingling of forks and glasses.
At the very bottom of the room, near the bay window opened on the undergrowth, Minh and Linh had already taken possession of the corner table.
At 19 years of age, the twins that Lazare had brought back from the age of 11 years earlier formed a duo as inseparable as it was contrasted. Minh, the black hair quaked, a tiled shirt open on a white t-shirt, gesticulated with its fork in front of a copiously trimmed plate while scratching latency formulas on the back of a paper table set.
In front of him, Linh, dressed in a black, sleeveless rolled collar that highlighted his graceful head port, cut his meat calmly next to a long, rigid cardboard flat tube and a box of aluminum samples.
"Ah, still! exclaimed Minh when he saw Lazare and Karim lay their trays on the table. Uncle Karim, I thought you fell asleep in the compiler! And Dad, tell my sister right away that she has no right to reduce the height of my passive dissipator by 12 millimeters on the future motherboard on the pretext that it breaks her"gold number"!"
Lazare sat between her two adoptive children with a warm laugh, while Linh looked up in heaven with offended dignity.
"I don't reduce your dissipator by aesthetic whim, you thermal barbarian,"replied Linh from tac to tac. I explain that if you put your memory bars perpendicular to the flow of laminar air, you create an area of turbulence that forces us to stick a noisy fan! A creative computer must not sound like a hairdryer!"
Before settling the dispute, Lazare noticed a violacious bruise on Minh's right wrist and a slight scratch on the boy's chin. He arched a fun eyebrow by breaking a piece of stick.
"Tell me, Minh... this blue on your forearm, is it a mass return on an oscilloscope or did your grandfather resume training?"
Minh turned slightly red and rubbed his chin with a big smile.
"Papy Auguste called me last night at nine o'clock to tell me that the surgeon had finally authorized him to remove his scarf,"admitted the young man. He just wanted to"check his support"on the garage tatami.
Dad, I swear to you, when he was sixty years old and with a clavicle barely re-welded, he sent me to the carpet three times in twenty minutes on an inside scan! And then he made me dismantle and pull up his SIG P210 blindfolded by timing with his old watch!"
Karim punged into his glass of water while Lazare smiled with deep tenderness.
Seeing Auguste, whom his forced retirement had initially darkened in January, postponing his old soldier energy on Minh, and seeing that kid born in the ruins of Vietnam calling the general of the DST"Papy"by being projected on a tatami, was one of the most beautiful silent victories of his second life.
"Your grandfather cheats on the scanning of the left foot by moving his shoulder half a second forward,"confided Lazare half a voice on the conspirator's tone. Next time, lower your center of gravity as soon as he closes his right elbow. But don't ever tell her that the tip comes from me, or I'll get the chronometer next Sunday."
"Market concluded!"jubila Minh before pushing back his empty plate and pulling his set of tables covered with calculations towards Lazare. His look as an inner teenager instantly turned into this overwhelming mathematical acuity that made him, at the age of 19, the undisputed prodigy of Meudon's interconnecting buses.
"Seriously, Dad,"Minh said in a low voice to be heard only from their table,"I spent the morning with Dr. Volkov on the electrical specifications of his future memory CELLA-M3 at two hundred and sixty-six megatransfers per second.
If we want your future 64-bit VESLA-IV to feed both its eight runs and the next graphics processor without saturating the copper tracks of the motherboard, the classic star routing will no longer go to one hundred thirty-three megahertz real clock. The signal reflections at the end of the line distort the downward front of the DDR signal!"
Lazare laid his cutlery, captivated. He looked at the pattern his adopted son had just scratched between two spots of white sauce.
"And how do you intend to cushion the reflection without adding two latency cycles to the input buffer? asked Lazare, testing the boy as he would have done with a senior engineer from Cambridge."
"By connecting the banks by controlled impedance with an active termination directly at the foot of the last module, and by dephasing the 90-degree battery data clock from the control clock! replied Minh, the bright eyes of intellectual fever. I talked about it last night on the phone with Didier, you know, Aunt Claire's polytechnic boyfriend working at the high frequency integration lab.
He has a great idea of flying routing to equalize the electric length of the tracks to the nearest tenth of a millimetre!"
Lazare exchanged a look with Karim. Didier, the young engineer his discreet sister, Claire, had been with for a few months, and Minh were already converging on their own towards the exact topology of fly-by routing that would make the supremacy of the memory architectures of the following decade.
"Continue digging this track together with Volkov, valida Lazare by tapping Minh's diagram. If you prove to me on an oscilloscope bench by September that your 90-degree phase-out holds up to one hundred and fifty megahertz without a gigue, I will include it in the final specifications of Socket B6."
Minh shook his fist under the table as a sign of triumph, but Linh immediately pushed back the table set of his twin with an imperial back of his hand, spread the bread basket and stole on the solid oak a large sheet of black Canson paper enhanced with white chalk and silver mine.
"In my turn,"said the young girl, with a clear voice that silenced the three men. You can invent all the 64-bit processors and all the Russian memories you want: if you put this next year in Compaq's horrible yellowish beige plastic enclosures, I quit and go to Florence to do Fine Arts."
Lazare and Karim pee on the drawing.
What Linh had drawn had nothing in common with computer science in the 1990s. It was a monolithic tower with pure and slightly curved edges, shaped in a single block of brushed aluminum titanium grey, without a single visible screw on the front, without unsightly floppy disk bay.
The base and top of the machine were open with an invisible geometric net that drew, by the game of shadows alone, Volta's"V".
"This is the Volta ARC station, announced Linh by placing next to the drawing a four-millimetre-thick aluminium plate machined in the foundries of their great uncle Henri Dufresne in Dunkirk. The exclusive agreement with Compaq expires this fall. In 1998, for the changeover to 64 bits, Volta had to sign its own machines from A to Z."
She slided her fine index finger along the inner section of the case.
"All of Dunkirk's aluminum hull acts like a passive giant radiator,"she explained, giving a victorious look to her twin brother. The interior is divided into three waterproof vertical thermal tunnels: one for your VESLA-IV processor, one for Volkov memory and the graphics card, one for power supply.
Two large slow fans of one hundred and forty millimetres with magnetic rolling down make the fresh air naturally rise by chimney effect. Eighteen decibels at full load.
And the side wall opens with one finger with an outcropper handle, without screwdrivers. When an architect, engineer or director puts the Volta ARC on his desk in May 1998, he will feel that the US PCs come from the Stone Age."
Karim whistled gently between his teeth, passing the palm over the silky and glazed grain of the brushed aluminum sample.
"It is a work of art, Linh, blew the technical director. René Castella will tear out the rest of the hair to stamp curves like the tenth millimetre, but it's sublime."
Lazare no longer looked only at the drawing. He looked at Linh and Minh, these two children whom he had tightened against him eleven years earlier in the moist heat of a Vietnamese orphanage, to discuss the future of global computing in equal measure with him, while the midday sun crossed Meudon's beech leaves and made the metal shine on the wooden table.
"Rene will scold for two hours, then he will build the most beautiful machining chain in Europe to please my daughter,"smiled Lazare gently wrapping Linh's plan so that no drop of coffee would stain him. This is validated for May 1998.
Today, let the old world celebrate our latest 32-bit processor. Bernard just pulled out the hot apple pies, and no one talks about silicon before coffee."