Location: Boardroom, Volta SA Headquarters (Ivry-sur-Seine).
Date: Mid-February 1995.
Point of view: Omniscient (Sliding focus on Édouard Renault-Tessier and Lazare Bonaparte).
The icy rain of mid-February lashed against the immense bay windows of the « Bunker » in Ivry-sur-Seine. Outside, the Parisian sky weighed on the city like a leaden lid, sad and dreary. But inside the Boardroom, located on the top floor of Volta SA's world headquarters, the climate no longer obeyed the whims of the atmosphere.
The air was conditioned, dry, and the atmosphere was neither one of panic for survival, nor of the electric tension of the eve of battles.
She was at the harvest.
A cold, methodical and relentless mathematical harvest.
Around the large Macassar mahogany table, the top brass of the Ivry Ogre had taken their seats. Their faces still bore the dark circles of hypergrowth, but the existential terror that had gripped them the previous year had evaporated.
Facing them, standing before the large projection screen, Édouard Renault-Tessier adjusted his glasses. The former investment banker, now the grand chancellor of Volta's economy, held the projector's remote control with the deference of a priest preparing to read sacred texts.
« Gentlemen, » began Édouard, his voice ringing with absolute clarity in the silence of the room. « Last year, in this very room, I presented you with the financial statements for 1993. A year of extreme surface tension, where every penny earned was immediately incinerated into the foundations of our independence, the Alsace MegaFab.
A net profit of zero. »
He clicked. The first slide of the 1994 exercise appeared on the screen in phosphorescent green characters on a black background.
« Today, the factory is paid for. The infrastructure is built. The civilian world has been flooded. The time for statistical analysis has arrived. »
The first detail that struck the assembly was not the enormity of the numbers, but the symbol that preceded them. In accordance with the doctrine established by Lazarus the previous year, there was no longer a trace of a French Franc, a German Mark, or an American Dollar on the board.
The scriptural Euro, this phantom currency that politicians had accelerated under pressure from Volta, reigned supreme. Volta SA calculated, invoiced, and hoarded in the currency of continental sovereignty.
« 1994 was the year of the AXIOM Tsunami, continued Edouard, the red laser beam of his pointer circling the line of revenues for the consumer hardware division. »
« When we launched the Compaq AXIOM 2150 SX at the dumping price of 381 Euros last spring, we knew demand would be high. Reality shattered the physics of distribution. By flooding the market with these inferior chips, the waste engineering demanded by Mr.
Bonaparte has wrought a silent massacre. »
The financier scrolled through the market share graphs. Intel's red lines collapsed into thin air.
« The American entry-level market is dead in Europe, » Édouard observed, implacably. « Their 486 processors are rotting on distributors' shelves. Schools, universities, the middle class, and emerging markets have bought only one machine this year: ours.
We've sold just over fourteen million units of the 2150 SX worldwide. Volume has crushed our fixed costs. On chips with a marginal cost of zero, the profit margin is so obscene that traditional accounting struggles to model it. »
He moved down one line on the board.
« And this is only the tip of the iceberg. While the AXIOM was strangling the West, the Rising Sun was paying us tithes. »
Edward displayed the revenues related to intellectual property in Asia.
« The agreement signed with Sony for the integration of our SONG-III graphics processor into their PlayStation is a lifeline directly connected to the heart of the world's youth. End-of-year sales in Japan were phenomenal.
The console is a cultural triumph. And according to our terms, twelve percent of every machine sold, and twelve percent of every game coded using our libraries, goes directly to our Luxembourg holding companies.
It's a continuous stream of revenue. A tax on the imagination. »
The finance director put down his remote control. He took a deep breath, savoring the dizzying final figure he was about to reveal.
« Gentlemen. By combining the sales of the AXIOM, the Asian revenue from Sony, the renewal of the IMPERATOR servers for the Ministry of Defence and the collection of the Carte Bleue, the consolidated turnover of Volta SA for the financial year 1994 amounts to 12.4 billion Euros. »
Silence fell like lead. Eighty billion francs.
« And this time, with the MegaFab investment completed, gross profitability skyrockets. Our net profit after taxes and structural reinvestment amounts to 4.8 billion Euros. »
Edward looked at the assembly, his eyes wide with the immensity of his own announcement.
« Adding to that the €5.79 billion contingency fund we set aside last year... Our company's net and readily available cash surpassed €10.5 billion this morning. We have more liquid reserves than the central bank of an average European nation.
We are no longer a multinational. We are a macroeconomic anomaly. The tyranny of profit margins is absolute. »
The vice presidents and directors exchanged stunned glances. The figure was too vast for a normal human brain to grasp. It was the power to buy countries, to overthrow governments, to enslave entire continents.
But at the end of the table, in the dim light, Lazare Bonaparte did not even crack a smile.
He, strapped into a dark suit, his face expressionless, was not celebrating anything. He viewed these ten and a half billion Euros not as spoils of war, nor as the culmination of a lifetime.
For Lazarus, this mass of capital was merely a reinforced shield. An electromagnetic shield woven from zeros and ones in clearing accounts, designed to absorb the geopolitical shockwaves that would inevitably crash down upon them.
The American Eagle was wounded, Samsung and the Asian tigers were sharpening their teeth. Silicon knew no respite. Silver was merely the fuel for the next forge.
« The figures are accurate, Édouard, » Lazare's gravelly voice cut in, instantly crushing any hint of euphoria in the room. « The financial harvest is in.
But it's merely the consequence of physical superiority. Money won't protect us from a quantum leap from Silicon Valley. Only matter will. »
Lazare rose slowly. He walked around the large mahogany table to approach the two men seated to his right: Karim Belkacem and Ilya Volkov.
« The market is applauding our financial results. Let them look in the rearview mirror. We're going to show them the wall they're about to crash into.
Ilya, Karim. Bring out the ironclad doctrine. The autopsy is over.
It's time to talk about the future. »
Édouard Renault-Tessier faded into the shadows, cutting off the beam of his laser pointer. The financial deed was done, but in the religion of Lazare Bonaparte, gold was merely a by-product of intelligence.
Lazare turned his dark, unfathomable gaze towards the ex-Soviet scientist sitting to his right.
« Over to you, Ilya. Show them what the factory in Alsace has produced. »
Dr. Yuri Volkov rose with the deliberate slowness of men who know they have made history. The former star of the Moscow Academy of Sciences wore not a tailored suit, but a simple white shirt and a worn tweed jacket.
He didn't care. His true adornment was knowledge.
He placed a small, vacuum-sealed, transparent acrylic box on the mahogany table. Inside lay a square of black ceramic, of absolute purity, adorned with a nickel-plated copper heat sink.
« Last year, » Volkov began in his gravelly voice, « I put my head on the chopping block, promising you that our VESLAv3 architecture didn't need to be replaced by risky three-dimensional concepts. I wagered that the perfection of its logical design would allow us to dominate the world for four years, simply by manipulating the physics of materials. »
The Russian scientist pointed at the box.
« I have the honor of presenting to you the weapon of our continuity. The VESLA-III 2290 . »
A murmur rippled through the table. The vice presidents leaned forward to examine the chip. To the naked eye, it looked exactly like the previous generation that powered the millions of AXIOMs sold last year.
« You are watching Intel's planned obsolescence crash against thermodynamics, » Volkov declared with a chillingly arrogant sneer.
The Russian pressed a button on the central console. The large projection screen lit up again, displaying cross-sections of silicon captured by an electron microscope.
While Andy Grove and the engineers at Santa Clara are exhausting themselves melting silicon with their 0.8-micrometer Pentium chip—a chip so hot it requires aircraft fans to prevent it from self-destructing—the MegaFab in Strasbourg has made a silent quantum leap. We have finalized the Die Shrink .
Volkov let the word sink in. The footprint reduction.
« Our ASML ultraviolet lasers and second-generation Zeiss optics now master the 0.35-micrometer triple-metal CMOS process, » revealed the R&D director. « The chip is physically half the size. The electrons have half the distance to travel. »
« And the ballistic result? » asked René Castella, the production manager, his eyes shining.
Karim Belkacem, who had supervised the software integration, took over with obvious jubilation.
« The result, René, is that we've kept exactly the same logic architecture, » the technical director asserted. « Not a single transistor has been added to the execution pipeline. It's still our 4-issue Out-of-Order with two-thread Simultaneous Multithreading .
The only difference is that, thanks to the 0.35-micron manufacturing process, the chip barely heats up anymore. It incorporates 5-mode DVFS to manage its voltage on the fly. »
Karim placed both hands on the table, dominating the audience.
« Last year's VESLA 2190 had a maximum frequency of 66 MHz. The VESLA 2290 you see here... runs at 200 MHz. »
Silence fell once more in the Council chamber, total and dizzying.
Two hundred megahertz.
Intel had barely announced, amidst the turmoil, 90 and 100 MHz versions of its Pentium, mired in catastrophic performance issues and an infamous floating-point division bug. Volta had just tripled its own clock speed without changing a single line of its basic architecture.
And thanks to the space freed up on the die by miniaturization, Volkov had doubled the size of the L2 cache, bringing it to 576 KB.
« 200 MHz, coupled with our SMT which processes two streams in parallel... » murmured one of the engineering directors, wiping his glasses. « It's a monster. Intel is technologically doomed. »
« Intel is condemned, but it is the way we are going to carry out the sentence that is fascinating, » Lazare Bonaparte finally interjected.
Lazarus stood up. His silhouette was silhouetted against the screen displaying the power curves. He approached the box containing the chip, his dark eyes gleaming with Machiavellian prescience.
« Intel and Microsoft built their business model on the fear of upgrades, » the young CEO theorized. « When Intel releases a new chip, they change the motherboard form factor. When Microsoft releases a new version of Windows, it requires a brand-new machine to run it.
They force their customers to buy all the hardware again. It's extortion. »
Lazare tapped the acrylic shell.
« The VESLA-III 2290 will establish the Iron Doctrine. Loyalty through mathematical evidence. »
He turned to Nadia Chérif, the communications director.
« Do you remember the » Socket V « that we mandated last year on all Compaq AXIOM motherboards? That famous ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) socket? »
« Perfectly, » replied Nadia. « We sold it as a guarantee of longevity. »
« The time has come to keep our word. Karim, explain the software aspect to them. »
The technical director smiled, revealing the absolute elegance of the maneuver.
« The 2290 is 100% binary compatible with the VESLAv3 architecture, » Karim explained. « VoltaOS X doesn't need a single line of code modified to recognize it.
There are no drivers to install, no system patches to download. »
Lazarus spoke again, dictating the upcoming commercial campaign.
« Imagine the French Ministry of Defense, or the headquarters of Elf Aquitaine. They bought ten thousand AXIOM 2150 SX computers last year. Now they want more power.
If they go with the competition, they have to put out a tender worth tens of millions of euros to buy ten thousand new computers. »
Lazarus leaned back in his chair, like a sovereign.
« With us, they simply order cases of VESLA 2290 chips . Their technicians open the AXIOM case, lift the small lever on the Socket V, remove the old chip, slide in the new one, and lower the lever. One click.
Sixty seconds of work. They turn the machine back on, and their computer's power has literally tripled. For the price of a single component. »
Édouard Renault-Tessier understood the maneuver. The velvet trap was closing.
« No purchasing manager, no sane finance minister would ever justify switching to American PCs if they could triple the power of their existing fleet for a fraction of the price simply by buying our processor upgrades, » the former banker concluded. « We're locking them in a gilded cage.
Socket V is becoming a financial addiction. »
« Sovereign obsolescence, » Lazarus declared. « We don't suffer time, we control it.
The chip is perfect. But the equation for supremacy requires two variables. The processor calculates, but it needs space to breathe. »
He turned again to Doctor Volkov, whose eyes shone with an incandescence that only the pride of the researcher could ignite.
« Ilya. It's time to show them why South Korea just lost its war before it even started. »
Dr. Yuri Volkov did not sit down. Encouraged by Lazare Bonaparte's approval and the astonished attention of the general staff, the ex-Soviet scientist opened the second armored briefcase he had brought with him.
If the processor was the beating heart of the Volta ecosystem, then memory was its nervous system, the circulatory system that nourished the machine's intelligence. And on this front, the threat was not American, but Asian.
« While we're talking, » Volkov began, his voice deepened by the weight of pure engineering, « the Samsung conglomerate in Seoul is investing billions of won to build new factories. They're convinced that volume will eventually crush our lead.
They're desperately trying to master first-generation synchronous memory to catch up with our CELLA-64M . »
He carefully took out a second block of acrylic and placed it next to the prototype of the VESLA 2290 processor .
« It's a tragedy for them, » the Russian smiled coldly. « Because they're exhausting themselves investing in a war that's already over. »
Volkov turned the overhead projector back on. The specifications of the new chip appeared with the coldness of a guillotine.
« I present to you the CELLA-M2 . The second-generation synchronous dynamic memory. Etched in 0.30 micrometer triple-metal CMOS.
Its capacity has been quadrupled compared to last year's model. We're moving to 256 Megabits, distributed across eight independent banks, with a SECDED error corrector still natively integrated on the die. »
Karim Belkacem narrowed his eyes, analyzing the numbers that were scrolling by.
« 256 Megabits… That's colossal, » the technical director observed. « But capacity isn't everything, Ilya. If the VESLA 2290 now runs at 200 MHz, our 66 MHz memory will create a bottleneck.
The processor will spend entire cycles waiting for the RAM to provide the data. »
« That's exactly what Samsung and Intel are hoping for, » Volkov retorted. « They believe we'll hit the frequency wall.
They think that to double the bandwidth, you have to double the bus clock frequency, which generates deadly electromagnetic interference and uncontrollable overheating. »
The scientist leaned on the table, his eyes shining with academic mischief.
« But Soviet science never liked brute force. Why force the clock to tick twice as fast, when you can simply ask it to work twice as smart? »
He tapped the whiteboard with his stylus.
« The CELLA-M2 is clocked at 100 MHz. It's fast, but thermally manageable. The real weapon of this chip has an acronym that the whole world will have to learn the hard way: DDR. Double Data Rate . »
Karim's eyes widened, stunned by the audacity of the concept.
« In today's industry, » Volkov explained, « memory transfers one piece of data per clock cycle, only on the rising edge of the signal. That's the Single Data Rate standard .
But the CELLA-M2 is designed to transfer data on both the rising and falling edges of the clock signal. »
The silence in the room was absolute. The engineers present were visualizing the mathematical violence of the invention.
« We pump data twice per cycle, » Volkov concluded. « Without increasing the frequency, without generating more heat, the bandwidth is virtually doubled.
Coupled with our native BBI interface, the CELLA-M2 will spit out data at a speed that Intel's memory controllers couldn't even handle without melting. It's the world's first DDR DRAM, and Samsung has just fallen ten years behind technologically in the space of a morning. »
Édouard Renault-Tessier took off his glasses, massaging the bridge of his nose. The sheer brutality of the innovation left him speechless.
« The Koreans are going to build brand new factories to manufacture obsolete chips, » the financier understood. « They're going to flood the market with components that our own machines will refuse to use because they'll be too slow for Socket V. »
« Asian obsolescence is a given, » confirmed Lazare Bonaparte, who had not taken his eyes off the two prototypes.
The young CEO stood up and approached the table. Under the boardroom lights, the VESLA 2290 processor and the CELLA-M2 memory lay side by side in their transparent cases. Two fragments of black silicon, cold and inert, yet containing within them the genetic code for European supremacy for the end of the twentieth century.
Lazare placed his hands on either side of the two fleas.
He, whose soul had once known chaos, clandestine struggles, and the anguish of survival in the mire of intelligence, felt a metaphysical shiver run through him.
He remembered the company's beginnings. The small cellar on Rue de la Glacière where he hand-welded prototypes. The terror of the American embargo, the race against time to exfiltrate Volkov from Moscow, the cutthroat negotiations with Mitterrand, and the CIA bullets whizzing past his ears to prevent him from building this empire.
For years, Volta SA's existence had hung by a thread. The war had been a singular duel, a hand-to-hand combat, artisanal, intimate, and bloody.
But today, looking at these two chips produced using 0.35 and 0.30 micron etching, manufactured by machines he owned, in factories he controlled, financed by a cash reserve of ten billion Euros in scriptural form, Lazare understood that this heroic and fragile era was definitively over.
« Listen, murmured the Builder, his voice so low that it blended with the sound of the ventilation. »
Karim, Édouard, and Volkov fell silent, straining to hear. Through the triple-glazed windows, from the vast workshops on the lower levels and the telematics reports coming from Strasbourg, they could perceive the dull, weighty, steady rumble of hyper-industry.
The relentless rhythm of the MegaFab.
« That's the sound of victorious inertia, » Lazare explained, his dark eyes fixed on the silicon. « By capitalizing on the perfection of our foundation rather than reinventing the void with each generation, we have just killed randomness.
Risk no longer exists. »
He looked up at his lieutenants. His face no longer expressed the fever of battle, but the sovereign coldness of an absolute monarch.
« This is no longer a duel, gentlemen. The era of isolated geniuses fighting for their survival is over. With Socket V , DDR, and the precision of Alsatian manufacturing, we have mechanized our own supremacy.
Intel and Samsung are condemned to perpetual panic. If they lower their prices, we'll cripple our defective chips and bankrupt them. If they increase their clock speeds, they'll burn out.
If they copy our old architecture, we'll launch the next one without altering our production lines. »
Lazare Bonaparte smoothed the lapel of his jacket.
« The Empire breathes on its own. War is no longer a duel, nor an art. It has become an automated industrial slaughter. Prepare for the launch of the VESLA 2290. Let them crash into our walls. »