Location: Auguste Bonaparte's office, Usine Volta S.A., Ivry-sur-Seine
Date: Mid-January 1990
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Auguste Bonaparte)
Auguste Bonaparte's office was a radical contrast to the rest of the Volta factory. The former diplomat had recreated a sanctuary of the French high administration: dark woodwork, worn leather club chairs, and an imposing library housing books on international law and geopolitical strategy.
That morning, the air was heavy. The fog of Ivry seemed to have seeped in through the windows.
Auguste was sitting behind his desk, his face closed, his hands crossed over a file classified as "Secret Defense" flanked by the seal of the Presidency of the Republic. Facing him was Commander Vasseur, a liaison officer from the economic intelligence division of the DGSE. The man in civilian clothes, with an inscrutable look, had just arrived directly from the Elysée Palace.
The door opened without a sound. Lazarus entered.
The young CEO wore his eternal dark turtleneck sweater. He had just returned from the basement where the first feedback from AMD's Texas factories indicated that the chip engraving was going perfectly.
"You sent for me, father?" asked Lazare, seating himself with a fluid movement in the free chair beside Vasseur.
"Yes," replied Auguste, in a grave voice. Commander Vasseur has just brought me a summary note from President Mitterrand. The "Black File" that the DGSE has put together on the CIA is beginning to bear fruit in Europe, but America has decided to react with the brutality for which it is known.
Vasseur leaned forward and opened the file. The result was a transcript of telephone taps and several diplomatic cables intercepted by the NSA, a fraction of which the French services had managed to decipher.
"Monsieur Bonaparte," began the DGSE officer, addressing Lazare. Since the U.S. commando attacked our servers in Dakar last year, Intel has understood the nature of the threat posed by your architecture. Andy Grove spent December laying siege to the Pentagon and the White House.
"They're crying in the skirts of their government because they can't beat us in the labs," Lazare said, without the slightest emotion.
"It's worse than that," corrected Vasseur. They convinced the Bush administration's Department of Commerce. The U.S. government was preparing, in the greatest secrecy, a presidential embargo decree.
Auguste took over, his voice vibrating with restrained indignation.
"A total embargo, Lazarus." Under the guise of "national security", they were going to ban the import of any computer technology designed by Volta S.A. on American soil. They were going to put our processors in the same category as Soviet weaponry to prevent us from reaching their consumer market. If a single ship full of French computers had docked in New York or Los Angeles, federal customs would have seized the cargo and destroyed the machinery.
Auguste leaned back in his chair, looking for his son's gaze. He expected to see surprise, anger, or at least anxiety in the young man. The U.S. market accounted for fifty percent of the world's computing. A blockade would have nipped them in the bud.
But Lazarus remained perfectly unmoved. He crossed his legs and let the silence stretch.
"They were preparing an embargo," the Builder said, emphasizing the imperfect. Why didn't they sign the decree?
Commander Vasseur smiled more like a carnivorous grin. The intelligence officer looked at the twenty-three-year-old prodigy with undisguised admiration.
"Because your choices last week at the Crillon made this embargo legally and politically impossible, Mr. Bonaparte. Our moles in Washington report that the White House legal office tore its hair out last night.
Vasseur patted the note from the Élysée.
"You didn't send them boats full of French computers," the officer continued. You have sold a license to Advanced Micro Devices, an American company based in California. Silicon is currently being melted in Austin, Texas, by American workers. And you forced Compaq, one of the industrial hubbubes in Texas, to assemble the machines in Houston.
Auguste let out a small, almost relieved laugh, suddenly understanding the full depth of his son's strategy.
"Uncle Sam is caught in his own trap," the former diplomat gloated. George Bush is a Texan by adoption. He cannot sign an executive order prohibiting the sale of a processor engraved in Texas, integrated into a computer designed by a Texas company, and sold by thousands of American resellers! If he does, he will put tens of thousands of American workers and engineers out of work. Governors, Republican senators, the stock market... his entire political camp would turn against him!
"The shield is perfect," confirmed Vasseur. By forcing Jerry Sanders and Eckhard Pfeiffer to be your beachheads, you have turned the American industrial complex into a hostage to your success. Intel is screaming at the White House, but the White House's hands are tied. If they hit Volta, they destroy AMD and Compaq. The embargo is stillborn. The Bush administration quietly ordered Andy Grove to fend for himself in the open market. You have won, sir. The invasion of April 16 will take place.
Augustus looked at his adopted son. At times, Lazarus' clairvoyance terrified him. The Builder had never mentioned American tariff policy or the risk of blockade when he designed his Trojan Horse. He had acted with such a sharp geopolitical survival instinct that he seemed to be able to read the movements of his enemies before they even conceived them.
"You knew that, didn't you?" asked Auguste softly, once the euphoria had subsided. When you refused to assemble our own machines in France to flood the United States... You knew they would try to block us at the border.
Lazarus does not smile. He fixed the binding of the classified file placed on the desk. His memories of his first life, when France had been stripped of Alstom, Alcatel and Technip by the extraterritoriality of American law, still burned in his memory. He knew how the empire worked.
"The law of free trade is a fable that the Americans tell to the rest of the world to sell them their products," replied Lazare, his voice cold. But as soon as you threaten their hegemony, they use the law as a weapon of war. The only way to escape Washington's stranglehold is to make your destruction lead to their own economic suicide. This is nuclear deterrence applied to the supply chain.
The Builder stood up slowly, smoothing the folds of his pants.
"Tell President Mitterrand that I thank him for his vigilance, Commander. But the legal and diplomatic aspect of this war is only a smokescreen. Andy Grove will not admit defeat because his government has abandoned him. Intel has colossal financial reserves and the best engineers in America. As soon as the AMD-Volta V-1 processor comes out at COMDEX, they'll buy our chips, put them under an electron microscope, and start reverse engineering our architecture.
"They'll be five years behind your technology," Auguste objected, confidently.
"Five years is an eternity for a normal man. "It's a blink of an eye in our industry," Lazare said. If they put two billion dollars on the table, they will reduce that delay to three years.
Lazarus walked towards the door of the office. He put his hand on the solid brass handle. His mind was no longer in that room. It was no longer in January 1990. It was already projected into the clock cycles of the coming decade, into the age of interconnected information that was about to sweep over humanity.
"Father." Arranges a meeting with Karim Belkacem, the silicon architecture team, and the hardware department directors. I want everyone in the Research Bunker within an hour.
Auguste frowned, surprised by the urgency of the tone.
"An emergency?" Is there a problem with the spring launch?
"The launch of spring is over," Lazarus said, his dark gaze seeming to pierce the wood of the door. The architecture of the V-1000 that Compaq will sell was drawn in my head three years ago. It is already obsolete.
The former diplomat and the DGSE officer exchanged a stunned look. The product that would shake up the world economy had not even been released yet, that it was already dead in the mind of its creator.
"We'll move on," the Builder announced. The chip no longer just has to calculate, it has to connect and draw. Get the meeting room ready, father. We will open the VESLA-III folder.
Location: The "Bunker" (Equipment R&D Laboratory), Volta S.A. Factory, Ivry-sur-Seine
Date: End of January 1990
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
Thirty meters below the surface of the industrial zone of Ivry-sur-Seine, the atmosphere in the "Bunker" was like the end of the siege. The silicon engineers of Volta S.A. were savouring a hard-fought victory. On the workbenches, surrounded by oscilloscopes and test stations, were the first test samples of the V-1000 processor (the VESLA-II).
The chip worked perfectly. The superscalar RISC architecture delivered on its promises, shattering all known test beds. Developers, mask designers, and lithography experts drank cold coffee and laughed out loud, releasing the pressure of a year of sleepless nights. They had defeated physics. They had defeated Silicon Valley.
The heavy pneumatic door opened with a hissing sound.
Lazare Bonaparte entered the laboratory. Silence instantly fell on the room, chilling the smiles. The Builder exuded neither euphoria nor satisfaction. He walked to the center of the room, his dark eyes sweeping the tired faces of his elite squad.
"You did an excellent job on the V-1000," Lazarus said in a matter-of-fact, unwarming voice. Thanks to you, we have the weapon that will allow us to take the U.S. market by storm this spring.
A murmur of pride ran through the ranks. It was one of the few compliments the young CEO ever made.
"Enjoy this victory today," Lazare continued, walking towards the huge whiteboard that covered the back wall. Because by tomorrow morning, the V-1000 will be dead.
Pride turned to incomprehension. Karim Belkacem, who was overseeing the integration between the hardware and the VoltaOS system, stepped forward, frowning.
"Dead?" Lazarus, the masks have just left for Texas. The chip isn't even in stores yet! It will take Intel five years to understand how we managed to process three instructions per cycle.
"Intel is going to copy the superscalar concept, finance it with the Pentagon's billions, and come back with a chip that will equal us," Lazarus said, erasing the previous day's schematics with the back of a dry cloth. If we sit on this victory and count our profits, we will be swept away in 1994. The V-1000 is an architecture that I designed three years ago. In my mind, it's already an antique.
Lazarus grabs a black marker.
"We're not going to wait for them to catch up with us." We are going to dig a chasm so deep that they will not even be able to see our wake. We're going to skip an entire generation. Welcome to the VESLA-III project.
The marker squeaked on the whiteboard. Lazarus began to draw logic blocks of dizzying complexity. The engineers approached, fascinated and terrified by what they saw appear before their eyes.
"The classic superscalar is limited by the order of the code," the Builder explained, tracing queues of virtual registers. If an instruction is waiting for a piece of data in memory, the entire pipeline stops. It's a waste of a clock. The VESLA-III will not do that. It will run the code out of order.
A stunned silence greeted the announcement.
"Speculative execution?" whispered the head of the hardware team, wide-eyed. Out-of-Order on a desktop processor? This is pure theory, Lazarus. The logic of reordering instructions will cause the number of transistors to explode! We're going to exceed a million!
"We're going to be close to three million transistors," Lazare corrected with absolute calm. And we're going to embed a level 2 cache directly into the ceramic of the chip, at the same speed as the core. The chip will guess the branches of the code even before the software asks for them.
Lazare knew that he was forcing his engineers to invent, in 1990, the very foundations of what would become Intel's Pentium Pro by the end of the decade. But that was only half of his vision.
The former secret agent looked at his men. His "memory of tomorrow" dictated to him an absolute urgency. As he spoke, somewhere in the CERN laboratories in Switzerland, a computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee was writing the protocols for an obscure concept called the World Wide Web. The 90s were not going to be the decade of calculation, it was going to be the decade of global interconnection.
"Calculating faster is no longer enough," Lazarus announced solemnly. The computers we are going to sell tomorrow will no longer be isolated islands. The next revolution will be the network. High-speed data exchange.
He drew a new block next to the arithmetic unit.
— The VESLA-III will be the world's first "Internet-Ready" processor. I want you to integrate a 10/100 Megabit Ethernet network controller directly into the silicon, as well as hardware instructions for calculating TCP/IP checksums. When the world wants to connect, our chip will do the job ten times faster and with a hundred times less effort than any American expansion card.
The engineers looked at each other, pale. Integrating network logic into a central CPU was architectural heresy at the time.
"But it doesn't stop there," added Lazare, implacable, this time addressing Karim Belkacem. The graphical interface of VoltaOS 3.0 will have to be absolutely fluid. No more window calculations that drain power from the CPU. The image will have its own brain.
Lazarus drew a large square on the board, connecting it to the central processor by a new type of channel.
— Forget the ISA bus. He's dead. We are going to design the BBI, the Bonaparte Bus Interface, a proprietary 64-bit bus capable of transferring half a gigabyte per second. And at the end of this bus, we're going to plug this in.
He wrote three letters in the center of the square: GPU.
"The SONG-III project," the Builder announced. The first Unified GPU. It won't be a simple map that displays 2D pixels. It will be a mathematical monster dedicated to spatial geometry. I want texture mapping with material perspective correction. I want anti-aliasing. I want real-time alpha blending to manage the transparency of our operating system windows.
An engineer at the back of the room let out a nervous, almost hysterical laugh.
"Lazarus—" What you are asking for... that's the computing power of a hundred-thousand-dollar Silicon Graphics workstation! Want to miniaturize this on a desktop daughter board? It's impossible. No one needs 3D on a desktop PC!
" No one needs it because no one knows it's possible yet," Lazare snapped, his gaze pinning the engineer to the spot. We are not going to build what the market needs today. We will build the standard that the whole world will have to align itself with tomorrow. I want the SONG-III to be able to spit out half a million textured polygons per second.
Lazarus placed the marker on the edge of the painting with a sharp snap. He had laid out his roadmap. He had just anticipated the 3Dfx revolution by five years, and the modern x86 architecture revolution by four years.
"The chips will be engraved in 0.8 micron CMOS," concludes the CEO. The launch date of the VESLAv3 architecture is set for March 1991. You have one year and two months.
The silence in the Bunker was heavy, suffocating. The engineers who had been celebrating their victory five minutes earlier had just realized that they were enlisted in perpetual war. Lazare Bonaparte would never offer them respite. Sovereignty was not acquired with a single chip; it was maintained by a continuous acceleration, suffocating the enemy under the weight of planned obsolescence.
Karim Belkacem walked over to the board, looked at the insane patterns of the Out-of-Order and unified GPU, then sighed as he ran a hand through his curly hair.
"You're a fucking bully, Lazarus," the software genius whispered with a weary smile but a spark of pure excitement. March 1991. Very well. I'll have to rewrite the entire graphics core of the OS to take advantage of this BBI bus...
"That's exactly what I'm paying you for, Karim.
Lazarus turned to his troops.
"Go back to work, gentlemen. The world is about to discover our past. It is time to forge its future.