The Swarm's Rogue Binding

Chapter 94 The Swarm's Rogue Binding

If there were a "ranking of the most shocking moments" for tonight's press conference, Pony Ma would definitely be number one.

He sat in the first row on the left, and compared to the excited, nervous, or whispering faces around him, his posture was nothing special.

With his hands resting on the armrests and his back slightly leaning against the chair back, his gaze was fixed on the young man on the stage, his expression maintaining a composure honed over many years.

But his hands betrayed him.

From the moment Yang Yi began explaining the binary translation layer, his right hand, which was resting on the armrest, slowly clenched into a fist, until Yang Yi uttered the six words "standing at the top of the world," at which point it slowly relaxed.

He is the richest and has the highest status here.

But it is precisely because I stand at a high vantage point and have come into contact with many things that I know how terrifying the bee swarm will be after today.

He's seen far too many press conferences.

XunTeng has held its own events, its partners have held its own events, and its competitors have held its own events.

Most of the speakers on stage are good at making empty promises, telling stories, and hiding a vague boundary behind the data that "we can do it soon".

He was so familiar with these lines on stage that he could tell the general direction of the conversation from the very first sentence.

But tonight is different.

The promises that kid on stage made today were all freshly made. Batteries, chips, systems, and translation layers—four tracks—are being implemented simultaneously, complementing each other.

Moreover, the product data for each track is collected from physical samples, making it extremely reliable.

He could count the number of times he had seen this "say what you mean and do what you say" rhythm on two hands in his decades-long business career.

The boss dares to think big, and the employees dare to act big.

That alone puts them ahead of 90% of the companies here.

He quickly went through the development path of the bee colony over the past few years in his mind.

From the near bankruptcy of "Guns of Legends" to the forced survival of "Arad's Wrath" by piggybacking on the success of XunTeng, and then to the explosive success of "Rainbow Six Siege" and "Overwatch".

Then suddenly they veered into completely unrelated fields like batteries, chips, and systems. Every step felt like a gamble, but they won every single one.

I really regret not investing in a bee colony two years ago; that was probably the closest I've ever come to a bee colony.

What now?

The swarm has entered four tracks: games, engines, semiconductors, and batteries, and it has taken an extremely deep first step on each track.

He did the math.

On the gaming front, Rainbow Six Siege and Overwatch are still being produced steadily, and at least two more S-tier games are waiting to be released.

On the engine side, the Bee Engine is already one of the world's largest general-purpose engines, and its developer ecosystem is growing bigger and bigger.

Although the battery and semiconductor industries are still in their early stages, with the backing of energy and flowers from tonight's press conference, there's basically no need to worry about the supply chain and orders.

Don't be fooled by the previous valuation of only 35 billion; after tonight, it's likely to approach 100 billion.

If we proceed steadily for two years, the total revenue will likely exceed 2000 billion.

They don't even need another product like Overwatch; just the gaming business alone could push their valuation to over 600 billion.

He sat there, his gaze fixed on the young man on the stage who was gesturing for quiet from the audience, and a thought crossed his mind:

If the investment in Hive back then had been successful, at least one of the speakers sitting there now would be from XunTeng.

But that thought quickly passed; there's no going back in reality.

He loosened his clenched fist, lightly rested it on the armrest, and leaned back in his chair.

Yang Yi, standing on the stage, had already raised the microphone: "Alright, the main course is finished. Next up is dessert time."

He paused for a moment: "The technologies I'm about to introduce don't have a physical form. Or rather, their physical form is already integrated into the FG series graphics cards."

The audience fell silent for a moment, waiting for him to continue.

"As everyone knows, Beehive is a gaming company."

After saying that, Yang Yi couldn't hold back anymore. Her lips twitched, she almost dropped the microphone, and she chuckled softly.

A burst of suppressed laughter came from the audience. He had repeated this sentence at least three times tonight, always saying it before the most hardcore technology release, like a gatekeeper hanging at the front door, inconspicuous but unavoidable.

The people present were all media figures and bigwigs in the tech industry, and before they came, they all had the preconceived notion that "what kind of mess can a game developer make?"

As a result, Yang Yi talked about batteries, chips, systems, and binary translation layers, each of which was highly technological.

Then at this point, he added, "As everyone knows, we at Beehive are a game company," as if someone were apologizing to you while simultaneously slapping you mercilessly.

They say the most cowardly things, but fight the fiercest battles.

After Yang Yi and the others finished laughing, he coughed lightly and spoke again: "As a game company, of course we will make special optimizations for the game."

He turned his gaze from the audience to the main screen: "There are some things we originally wanted to announce at the game launch event, but they're too closely related to graphics cards. After careful consideration by the team, we decided to announce them today."

He stepped aside to avoid the main screen's view: "The first dessert's light tracking technology."

The scene on the big screen changed. A screenshot from the game Overwatch appeared on the screen. The character in the picture was standing in an indoor scene, with the light source shining down from the side and above, and the shadow on the ground had a blurred but uniform edge.

Yang Yi didn't rush to explain, letting the image linger on the screen for about five seconds before switching scenes. It was the same scene, but the edges of the shadows were now sharper and clearer, the light reflecting off the metal surface created a realistic halo, and a glass curtain wall in the corner revealed the silhouette of a character.

Someone in the audience blinked.

"Ray tracing is not a new concept," Yang Yi said, "but there are currently no mass-produced hardware-level ray tracing products on the market."

The first generation of swarm ray tracing technology is integrated into the FG series GPUs.

He glanced at the comparison images on the screen: "With the ray tracing development module of the Bee Queen Engine 2.0, developers don't need to write additional ray tracing code; simply selecting it within the engine will activate it. The engine automatically generates the ray tracing rendering pipeline. Developers only need to work on the scene; ray tracing is handled automatically by the graphics card and the engine."

reason."

"Although it's somewhat unrelated to this press conference, I still want to make it clear that game development without ray tracing results in completely different visual presentations."

"Even if the scene lighting is set up perfectly during game development, the details of the lighting will still affect the visual experience. Our ray tracing technology can completely make up for the problems of details in lighting and shadow, and increase the realism and harmony of the picture."

People in the audience started whispering among themselves. Although they weren't interested in games, they knew that ray tracing technology clearly had other uses, such as in animated films.

Of course, it's not like no one pays attention to games; Pony Ma (Ma Huateng) still values ​​games quite a bit.

He's already starting to think about how many swarms of GPUs to purchase.

Thinking of this, he suddenly froze. To get good game graphics, you need the Queen Bee Engine 2.0, and all the functions of the Queen Bee Engine 2.0 require the Swarm GPU—FG190.

The most powerful queen bee engine platform currently is the whole bee colony bucket.

Doesn't this trap all the mainstream game companies?

Moreover, the performance of the entire swarm suite is by no means inferior; even with the translation layer, it surpasses the performance of the current three major chip manufacturers.

Quickly expand the chip track using game tracks and engine tracks.

How beautiful!

After the whispers subsided, Yang Yi continued, "After ray tracing, there's a second dessert. This dessert is bundled with ray tracing; one handles image quality, and the other handles performance."

He gestured, and the ray tracing comparison chart on the main screen disappeared, replaced by a new data table: "Swarm Neural Network Super-Resolution Rendering, BeeSR1. Built into Bee Engine 2.0, developers can use it with a simple check."

"The game renders low-resolution images, uses neural networks for real-time inference to fill in details, and outputs high-resolution images. The computational load is less than a quarter of that of native high-resolution graphics."

He paused for a moment: "The loss in image quality is almost imperceptible to the naked eye."

"Simply put, with the same GPU performance, enabling super-resolution technology can increase the game frame rate by 40% to 120% at the same image quality. The specific increase depends on the game type and optimization."

Hearing the exclamations from the media below the stage, Yang Yi was very satisfied and continued, "Of course, this technology can only be applied to games that use super-resolution code, and currently only the Bee King Engine 2.0 has super-resolution functionality built in."

"Games previously developed using the Bee Queen Engine can now have ray tracing and super-resolution added with a single click using Bee Queen Engine 2.0, while also being output in a game format that conforms to the swarm architecture with a single click."

This combination of thuggish and manipulative tactics really amused Little Ma.

Developing the best games requires the Queen Bee Engine 2.0, developing games with the Queen Bee Engine requires a swarm of computers, and players also need swarm computers to experience the best game effects.

You've taken over the entire gaming industry, from upstream to downstream?

Most importantly, all of this requires one prerequisite: that each section of the river is far ahead.

However, the bee colony is now far ahead.

Where the hell can we go to seek justice?

Yang Yi glanced at his watch; almost two hours had passed, and it was nearly time to wrap things up.

"Time's almost up, so I'll just gloss over the rest."

"We offer a special dual-graphics card crossfire mode for ultimate performance enthusiasts, which can bring a 70% performance boost to the FG190."

"There's also an invincible motherboard that can fully unleash the performance of swarm chips."

Yang Yi had already walked to the center of the stage when she finished speaking.

"As for the prices of the two chips—please look at the big screen!"

Yang Yi waved his hands, and a chip price list appeared on the large screen behind him.

FC190，3999元（比i7—8700K贵约四成，游戏性能高20%，办公性能高60%）。

FC170，2999元（比i7—8700K贵约7%，性能高20%）。

FC150，1999元（比i5—8600K贵约一成，性能高13%）。

FC130，1099元（比i3—8350K贵约两成，性能高15%）。

FG190, 7999 yuan (about 60% more expensive than GTX 1080 Ti, but 53% more powerful).

FG170，4999元（比GTX1080Ti贵约4%，性能高20%）。

FG150，3699元（比GTX 1070 Ti贵约4%，性能高45%）。

FG130，1999元（比GTX 1060 6G贵约一成，性能高65%）。

There was a moment of silence in the audience, then the discussion resumed.

This price wasn't cheap in the May 2018 market. It was significantly more expensive than Intel and Nvidia products on sale at the same time; flagship models were more expensive than flagship models, mid-range models were more expensive than mid-range models, and even the entry-level models were 5% more expensive than entry-level models.

Yang Yi didn't rush to explain. He waited for the brief commotion below the stage to subside before raising the microphone: "The price list is here."

It's a bit more expensive than other products on the market at the same time, I admit that.

"There are two reasons. First, memory chips. Everyone here should know how much global DRAM prices have risen in the last six months."

I understand. The memory modules developed by Swarm use the highest-specification chips currently on the market, and this alone makes them more than 30% more expensive than when Nvidia released its 10-series graphics cards last year.

He held up his second finger: "Secondly, it's all self-developed. From the architecture to the instruction set to the compiler, everything for the CPU and GPU is done by Hive itself. We can't cut corners on R&D costs, nor should we. The price we've managed to keep down to this level is already the result of our best efforts, given the initial R&D investment spread across the current chip production volume."

After saying this, he lowered his hand and looked back at the audience: "The price is right here. It's expensive, but the reasons for the high price are also right here. The performance data is also right here—you can calculate for yourselves which is greater, the price increase or the performance improvement."

"Furthermore, our bee colony is known for its integrity. We're launching a price guarantee here: if the three major players can lower their prices to match the same performance, our bee colony will refund the difference!"

Upon hearing this, the media in the audience stopped calculating the performance ratio. After all, they would conduct detailed tests when they got back, since that's what they do for a living.

They've already given us their quotes, what else can we say? If the performance is good, just buy it without hesitation.

Yang Yi's gaze swept over the faces of those below the stage who were processing the data, and she calmly went through another set of numbers in her mind.

FC130现在的对手是i3—8350K，贵了两成但性能高15%。明年九代i3出来的时候定价差不多也是这个区间，性能还比FC130低一截。

The market will figure this out itself in time.

Even better if the swarm really drives down the prices of the three giants.

Consumers buy cheaper goods, and the bee colony guarantees the price difference and refunds them, gaining both fame and fortune, and also taking the opportunity to put down competitors.

He'd love to see the three giants lower their prices, the more the better. After all, Hive's hardware costs are what they are—self-developed architecture, self-developed compiler, self-developed system, self-developed translation layer. Everything is their own from start to finish, and their cost line is on a completely different level from those companies that rely on licensing fees.

A 2080Ti dares to sell for 10000? Who gave Nvidia the guts? And the most important thing is that quite a few people are buying it.

Don't people all like performance?

Go ahead and mess around with those two FG190s. Even if Nvidia has the technology, they won't be able to come up with a graphics card this year that outperforms a dual-socket FG190.

He looked away and held the microphone to his mouth: "There are demo units in the showroom, you can try them out on the spot. After you try them out, you can decide for yourselves whether they're worth it."

"This concludes the Beehive Technology press conference. In ten minutes, members of the media are welcome to move backstage to experience the technologies unveiled today."

"If any business owners are interested in cooperation, please leave your business cards so we can discuss the details later."