Chapter 687: We Can't Let the Boss Lose! 30 Minutes, 200,000 Units, 1 Billion in Sales

After the Celestial Craft T100 was launched, Qualcomm purchased a sample.

They used semiconductor reverse engineering to analyze its circuit design and transistor layout, checking for similarities to Qualcomm’s patented technologies.

To Paul’s surprise, the Celestial Craft T100 had forged its own path. It used entirely self-developed technology for its digital signal processor, microcontroller unit, neural network processing unit, and even its voice wake-up and front-end processing technologies.

It left a deep impression on him at the time: this Eastern Technology Company, which started out assembling mobile phones, possessed formidable R&D capabilities.

Because of this, he specifically investigated the backgrounds of Tiangong Technology’s core researchers. He discovered they had hired Mike Keller, a former senior lead R&D engineer from Apple, as well as senior engineers from NVIDIA, Broadcom, and Texas Instruments. They had even poached some of Qualcomm’s own Chinese and foreign engineers.

But he refused to believe that the Celestial Craft A100 could bypass Qualcomm’s patent wall for its CPU, GPU, and baseband.

‘If they could really bypass it that easily, wouldn’t that mean the patent pool Qualcomm spent decades building was all for nothing?’

Even Mountain Star, Apple, and Huawei couldn’t escape Qualcomm’s patent litigation. What kind of waves could a mere Orange Technology possibly make?

Paul sneered to himself and sent a message to the head of the Asian Region, telling them to acquire a sample of the Celestial Craft A100 as soon as possible.

He planned to perform a physical layer teardown first, followed by a logical layer analysis. He would capture the chip’s signals during operation to check if its communication protocol stack used any of Qualcomm’s patented technology.

「Meanwhile.」

Professional tech websites like 36Kr, Huxiu, and TMT Media were the first to report on the launch of the Celestial Craft A100 Chip.

“Orange Technology’s Celestial Craft A100 Chip Makes Its Debut!”

“Peak Performance at Debut! Orange Mobile Phone’s GM Wang Teng Claims: Celestial Craft A100 Crushes the Snapdragon 800!”

“The Celestial Craft A100: A Purely Domestic System-on-a-Chip, the Pride of Hua Country Shines on the Global Stage!”

The Hisilicon K3V2, Hua Country’s first attempt at a self-developed SoC, had shortcomings in its manufacturing process, hardware architecture, and market competitiveness. Even its quad-core Cortex A9 architecture was licensed from ARM.

Netizens, naturally, didn’t consider that to be truly “self-developed.”

As for the Kirin 910, although it was planned to integrate the Balrog Baseband, the sudden emergence of the Orange Z1 Instruction Set changed things. After securing the patent license, He Tingbo decided to also incorporate some of Tiangong Technology’s radio frequency signal processing and modem technologies, which delayed its launch.

Therefore, the title of “Hua Country’s first truly self-developed SoC” fell to the Celestial Craft A100.

The netizens watching the livestream had their eyes glued to Wang Teng on stage.

His voice was calm, yet resonated with power as he spoke, “The Tianhe-100 CPU architecture utilizes the underlying logic of the Orange Z1 Instruction Set, optimizing multithreaded performance.

It can dynamically sense and control the peak performance of each core, flexibly enabling or disabling cores based on task demands. This allows it to meet high-performance processing requirements while effectively reducing power consumption and extending battery life.

“In our tests, it shows a performance increase of up to 60% and a 30% reduction in power consumption compared to the Snapdragon 800.”

It wasn’t that they were intentionally trying to put down Qualcomm. It was just that in 2013, telling users how good your chip’s performance was didn’t give them a clear picture. But if you said it was stronger than the Snapdragon series, everyone immediately understood and remembered.

Sitting in the audience, Wang Xiang, the President of Qualcomm’s Greater China Region, gave a faint smile. He didn’t seem to be taking the Celestial Craft A100 seriously.

From the perspective of his own performance metrics, the Celestial Craft A100 was only being used in Orange Technology’s Yaocheng series, so its impact on him would be minimal.

Furthermore, he had privately inquired about the manufacturing cost of the Celestial Craft A100 and found it was nearly on par with the Snapdragon 800.

‘In other words, regardless of performance, just based on price alone, the Celestial Craft A100 has no market competitiveness.’

It was just like Mountain Star’s Exynos chips, which were mostly for internal use and didn’t negatively affect Qualcomm in any way.

Besides, the main Orange series of smartphones were still using Snapdragon products.

So, while Qualcomm felt a certain degree of animosity toward Orange Technology at this point, it wasn’t particularly strong.

After all, chip design was just one link in the industry chain. Chip manufacturing was the most crucial part.

With the Celestial Craft A100’s order volume, it would be difficult to achieve economies of scale, so the foundry’s fees couldn’t be brought down.

Of course, the potential threat Tiangong Technology posed to Qualcomm could not be ignored.

This was the main reason Paul Jacobs had asked him to acquire a chip sample.

If they discovered any infringing activity on Tiangong Technology’s part, they would immediately file a patent lawsuit and drag the company into a legal quagmire.

At that point, Qualcomm could leverage the advantage of its patent pool, built over decades, to drain Tiangong Technology’s R&D resources and capital reserves with complicated litigation.

Even if they couldn’t ultimately kill the chip, they could at least slow its market expansion and bog Orange Technology down in a patent war it couldn’t easily escape.

Wang Xiang recalled Paul’s instructions and mulled them over.

On stage, Wang Teng continued his slow, deliberate presentation. “The GPU is built on the Profound Core architecture and integrates NVIDIA’s CUDA General Computing Core, Tesla acceleration model, PhysX physics engine, and Adaptive VSync technology.

“We’ve given it the internal designation Profound Core X100. It has a frequency of up to 790MHz, and its overall graphics processing performance is double that of the Adreno 330…”

The Tianhe-100 CPU!

The Profound Core X100 GPU!

The Liuhuo AI Acceleration Module!

The Hongyan Communication Baseband!

Wang Teng spent nearly an hour just explaining the architecture of the Celestial Craft A100 Chip.

He went into meticulous detail, explaining everything from the underlying architecture to its technological breakthroughs and advanced features.