Location: Management office, Usine Volta S.A., Ivry-sur-Seine
Date: January 1991
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
The month of January 1991 froze the Parisian suburbs under a persistent frost, but in Lazare Bonaparte's office, the atmosphere was one of total war. On his oak desk, a document marked "CONFIDENTIAL — REFERENCE VM-DS-001" rested under the harsh light of an architect's lamp. It was the final datasheet of VESLA-M Revision A: 40 MHz, 720,000 transistors, and a promise that would break Intel's backbone: "One software, two platforms."
The door opened. Alexandre de Vigan, Volta's chief marketing officer, walked in with a measured step. Unlike the exuberant advertisers of the time, de Vigan was a man of analytical coldness, a strategist who saw market shares as territories to be conquered by cunning and psychological terror.
"Have you read the technical sheet, Alexander?" asked Lazarus without looking up.
"Several times, Monsieur le President," replied de Vigan, sitting down. This SoC is a temporal anomaly. Integrate Ethernet controller and LCD management directly onto the silicon... If we launch this correctly, we are not selling a computer, we are selling the end of an era.
Lazarus straightened up.
"Exactly. I don't want a classic campaign. I don't want cheerful slogans, smiling families in front of a screen, or lists of specs. I want you to organize a disappearance.
De Vigan folded his hands, the spark of interest shining in his gray eyes.
"Explain to me."
— The World of Computer Science is Beige, by Vigan. Everything is beige. Compaq enclosures, IBM screens, Intel towers. It is the color of stagnation. I want you to launch a "ghost" marketing campaign on a global scale, but with one absolute condition: no one should know that it comes from Volta.
Lazarus slipped a handwritten note to his marketing manager.
— Use our structures in the United States to buy massive advertising space. I want the back cover of PC Magazine, Byte, and full pages in the Wall Street Journal. But no logo. No product name. Just an absolute black background, the black of the Nomad's hull.
De Vigan read the sentences that Lazarus had scribbled.
"On May 20, 1991, the Beige dies," he read aloud. "The future doesn't need a fan." It's surgically aggressive.
"I want Silicon Valley to sink into paranoia, Alexander. I want Intel executives, when they arrive in Santa Clara, to come across giant four-by-three-meter billboards, simply saying, "What's the point of a monopoly if it fits in someone else's pocket?"
The marketing manager gave a carnivorous smile. He understood the maneuver perfectly. By remaining anonymous, Volta would force the press and the competition to speculate, to investigate, to exhaust themselves. Each denial from Microsoft or Apple would only strengthen the aura of this mysterious predator who was about to appear.
"The budget?" asked de Vigan.
"Unlimited," said Lazarus. Tap into the reserves of the AMD-Volta branch. Jerry Sanders will be happy to finance his rival's death warrant.
Alexandre de Vigan stood up, putting the confidential datasheet away in his leather briefcase.
— I mobilize my guerrilla marketing teams. The contracts for the purchase of space will be signed through shell companies based in Delaware. In three weeks' time, Andy Grove will no longer sleep. He will spend his nights wondering who swore to kill beige.
"Good," concluded Lazarus. Go ahead. I want the silence of this campaign to be more deafening than any speech by Bill Gates.
Once alone, Lazarus returned to his window. De Vigan was the man for the job: an image goldsmith capable of turning a technological product into an existential threat. The trap was now armed. All that remained was to make sure that silicon would not betray the promise of marketing.
Location: The Bunker, Level -3, Hardware Laboratory, Volta S.A. Factory
Date: January 6, 1991 (evening)
Point of view: Omniscient (Focus on Lazare Bonaparte)
On January 6, 1991, at 6 p.m., as Volta's administrative employees were leaving the factory under snow squalls, Lazare Bonaparte descended into the bowels of his empire.
The psychological maneuver was launched by Alexandre de Vigan. Now they had to make sure that the rifle they were going to shoot with was not going to explode in their faces.
Level -3 was buzzing with the perpetual hum of air filtration systems and compute servers. In the Hardware laboratory, bathed in the pale glow of neon lights and oscilloscope screens, the director of the "Mobile Systems" division, Hélène, was fighting against fatigue. Around her, half a dozen engineers were busy around electron microscopes and logic testers.
In the center of the main room, set on a static test bench lined with probes, sat an experimental motherboard the size of a postcard. And soldered at its center, in its QFP-240 package, shone the very first physical sample of the VESLA-M processor.
The chip was no longer a drawing on a CAD station. It was silicon. The blood of the machine.
"Report," asked Lazarus as he entered the room, taking off his jacket and throwing it on a chair.
Helene sat up, a cup of warm coffee in her hand. She handed him a heavy file with the red seal CONFIDENTIAL DOCUMENT — REFERENCE VM-DS-001.
"The first Revision A wafers arrived from the Experimental Foundry at noon," the chief engineer announced, her voice hoarse from the tension. We mounted it on the test chassis. The engraving is clean. 720,000 transistors.
" Is he booting ?" Lazarus interrupted.
"Better than that." He breathes. VoltaOS loads in seconds from flash memory. Binary compatibility is perfect. The simplified 40 MHz pipeline swallows the VESLA-III instructions without any recompilation. And the energy management (DVFS) responds to the finger and the eye. In full load mode, we are at 3.5 watts. In hibernation, the consumption collapses to 0.02 watts. The battery life promises to be monstrous.
Lazare approached the test bench. The small color TFT LCD screen connected to the motherboard displayed the minimalist desktop of their operating system. It was an absolute triumph. The first System-on-Chip (SoC) in history worked.
But the Builder knew the reality of microelectronics too well to give in to euphoria. There was no such thing as a perfect first draft.
"Show me the errata," she ordered curtly. Where does the flea bleed?
Hélène sighed and opened the file to the page of the dysfunctions identified during the afternoon.
"We have two major hardware bugs, Lazarus. The first is the VME-001 ticket, which is linked to the shared memory controller. Because we integrated LCD management directly on the chip to save space, the CPU and video refresh use the same channel to access RAM.
The engineer typed a few commands on the keyboard connected to the test bench to start a heavy matrix calculation. Immediately, the LCD screen began to flicker, thin gray horizontal lines streaking the image with each cycle.
"When the CPU is saturated with requests, it starves the LCD controller," Hélène explained. Memory contention creates these intermittent rows.
Lazarus' face closed.
"Unacceptable," the CEO said. The Nomad is a luxury product. If the screen flickers when the user opens a large spreadsheet, the industry will scream amateurism. How much time and money to fix the silicon etching mask?
"Remaking a mask to add a hardware video line buffer would take three months and cost us millions," Helene warned. We would miss the COMDEX in May.
— What is the software workaround?
— We can saturate the bus by forcing the capacity. If the machine has 8 megabytes of RAM, there is enough bandwidth to avoid contention. Otherwise, with 4 megabytes, you have to limit the screen resolution to 640x480 instead of high definition.
"There will be no visual restraint," Lazare decided without an ounce of hesitation. The resolution will be maximum. Inform the assembly line: the base configuration of the Volta Nomad will increase from 4 to 8 megabytes of RAM. This will eat into our profit margin, but we will make up for it on the volume of sales. What is the second bug?
Helene turned the page.
— Ticket VME-003. An error on the software emulation of the floating point square root (FSQRT trap). You had asked to remove the full hardware FPU to save transistors. But in P2 power-saving mode, when the CPU drops to 20 MHz, the emulation collapses. It takes 90 clock cycles instead of 45. The chip lags disproportionately because of the latency of the DRAM.
"What does it mean for the end user?" asked Lazarus, his eyes fixed on the SoC.
— If a software is doing heavy math while the machine is in power-saving mode, the laptop will appear to freeze for a few milliseconds.
Lazarus thinks at lightning speed. Remaking the chip to add a hardware resolution table was not possible until the following year.
"We're going to cheat with the operating system," the Builder said. Call the VoltaOS development team tonight. I want them to code a hidden patch in the kernel. As soon as software intensively calls the FSQRT instruction, the system will have to force the chip back into high-performance P1 mode during execution and then back down to P2. The customer will never see it.
Helene took note frantically. Lazarus' solutions were harsh, but they worked. He filled in the flaws of silicon with the intelligence of the code.
"So... "Don't we restart a complete engraving?" asked the director, almost incredulous. Do we validate Revision A as is?
"The pure hardware fixes, such as the video buffer and hardware UPF, will be for Revision B next year," Lazare said as he closed the heavy technical file. Currently, Americans are stuck with processors that melt plastic and batteries that die within an hour. Our errata are minor details compared to the miracle of what you have accomplished today, Helen.
Lazare put his hand on the shoulder of the division director. It was a rare gesture, testifying to the immense respect he had for those who created the material.
— This processor is ready. The bugs are under control. Minh's chassis and Linh's design await him on the upper floor.
The young CEO looked at the tiny silicon chip, realizing that it alone contained the power to bring centuries-old empires to their knees.
"Call the assembly lines," Lazare ordered, his voice echoing like a cleaver in the clinical silence of the laboratory. I give the green light. Start the tape-out. I want a test production of a thousand units of the Volta Nomad finalized and packaged by the end of March.
The countdown to COMDEX had officially begun. The trap of black metal and plastic was ready to close in on Silicon Valley.