Chapter 108 The End of the X86 Architecture? First Release on the ARM Architecture PC Online

The lighter's ghostly blue flame flickered to life, illuminating one side of Lu Jingming's sharp canine tooth.

Half a month later. Donghai City Sports Center.

The spotlights on the stadium dome were all ablaze, their blinding beams of light crisscrossing.

The eight thousand seats were packed to capacity, and even the aisles were crowded with people.

The air was thick with the fermented scent of hair gel, sweat, and hot blood, making one's throat feel parched.

In the front row VIP area, a few blond-haired, blue-eyed foreigners sat with their legs crossed.

They wore press passes from top North America technology media outlets around their necks and held DSLR cameras with long lenses in their hands, all aimed at the empty main stage.

"I heard the Chinese are releasing a computer today," a bearded white reporter said, chewing gum as he turned to speak to his colleague.

"And it's made with mobile phone chips. Isn't this just a giant piece of electronic trash?"

His colleague curled his lip and snorted coldly. "Ballmer said on Twitter that they couldn't even create a boot screen."

He shook the voice recorder in his hand. "We're just here to watch a circus performance today."

In the backstage lounge, Chu Xuan was tugging desperately at his gaudy floral tie.

The collar of his floral shirt was soaked through with cold sweat, clinging icily to his back.

He dug a crumpled tissue out of his pocket and frantically wiped the greasy sweat from his forehead.

"Boss Lu, those foreign reporters outside are stirring up trouble." Chu Xuan swallowed hard, his legs trembling slightly.

"The Microsoft North America regional director is here, too, sitting right in the middle of the front row, staring us down."

Xia Weiliang was crouching on the leather sofa nearby, barefoot, her toes unconsciously digging into the sofa crevices.

The hem of her dirty lab coat dragged on the carpet. She had half an unfinished sausage—the kind that comes with instant noodles—clamped between her teeth, her cheeks bulging as she chewed vigorously.

"Staring my ass," she cursed indistinctly. "In a bit, I'll burn them all until they develop cataracts."

Lu Jingming stood up. He was still wearing the same faded black T-shirt and worn-out jeans. He kept one hand in his pocket, clutching that green plastic lighter.

His thumb pressed down on the flint wheel. "Click." The flame flickered for a second before he casually snapped it shut.

"Let's go." Lu Jingming pulled at the corner of his mouth, his eyes glinting with a wolf-like ferocity. "Let's go flip Microsoft's dinner table."

The lights in the main hall suddenly dimmed. A beam of cold white spotlight hit the center of the stage with a "swish."

Lu Jingming stepped out of the shadows. His old sneakers made a soft friction sound against the wooden floorboards.

The noise in the venue was instantly cut off as if by a knife. Immediately after, a few whistles with foreign accents came from the audience.

"Hey! Where's the PPT? Where's your draft of lies?" the bearded foreigner shouted at the top of his lungs.

An unrestrained burst of laughter erupted from the section where the foreigners were sitting. In the rules of Silicon Valley, a product launch was nothing more than a presentation full of fancy, puffed-up PPT slides.

Lu Jingming stopped. He scanned the arrogant faces in the audience, his Adam's apple bobbing twice. He let out a low, cold laugh, revealing one side of his stark white canine tooth.

"We at Xinghai don't sell waste paper." Lu Jingming didn't even hold a microphone; his voice carried throughout the venue via his lapel mic. "No PPT today, and we aren't talking about sentiment either."

He snapped his fingers. A massive, thirty-meter-wide circular screen behind him instantly powered on. In the center of the screen, a 3D rendering of a machine floated.

Ultra-narrow bezels. The silver-gray, all-aluminum body was as thin as a sharp razor blade. The exterior was smooth and seamless, without even a trace of rough heat dissipation vents to be found.

The laughter in the audience stopped abruptly, as if someone had suddenly choked them.

"This is Xinghai's first PC terminal. It is named MateBook."

Lu Jingming walked to the solitary long table in the center of the stage. A real unit sat on the table. He extended his index finger and casually pressed the fingerprint power button.

The screen lit up almost the instant he touched it. A deep nebula animation flashed by, and it entered the desktop in three seconds flat.

"I know what you want to see. You want to see how the ARM Architecture gets stuck in an X86 system." Lu Jingming braced his hands on the edge of the table, leaning forward like a leopard stalking its prey.

"Do you think running computer applications on mobile phone chips violates the laws of physics?" He turned his head, his gaze piercing directly at the pot-bellied Microsoft executive in the front row. "Today, I'll teach you what 'dimensional reduction strike' means."

The light and shadow on the giant screen shifted, changing into a real-time wireless projection of the actual machine's desktop. Without any unnecessary chatter, the mouse cursor slid across the screen and double-clicked an icon.

It was one of the most hardware-intensive AAA titles currently on the market. This game would make even Microsoft's top-spec machines run their fans until they smoked.

The screen switched into the game almost instantly. There was no long, black loading screen. Brilliant explosion effects burst onto the screen, and even the trajectories of flying sparks were clearly visible.

The frame rate monitoring software hovered in the corner of the top right. The number was locked firmly at 120 FPS. The green frame rate fluctuation curve beside it remained a perfectly straight horizontal line from start to finish, without even the slightest jagged jitter.

The entire sports center seemed to have been drained of oxygen. Eight thousand people stood with their mouths agape. All that could be heard was the roaring sound of gunfire from the game echoing against the stadium dome.

The bearded reporter's gum fell right onto his thigh. He stared fixedly at that straight green curve, bloodshot veins rapidly spreading across his eyeballs.

His index finger trembled, unable to press the camera's shutter. "This defies logic..." His lips quivered, his voice sounding like a leaking bellows.

"No dedicated graphics card... no water cooling pipes... how can it possibly run at a full 120 FPS!"

Lu Jingming didn't stop. He switched the game back to the background immediately, without even a single dropped frame or transition animation. Following that, large-scale video rendering software, heavy industrial modeling tools, and over a dozen of Microsoft Windows' flagship applications were all brutally left running in the background simultaneously.

The camera cut to the desktop. That MateBook remained as quiet as a dead piece of metal. There was not a single sound of fans roaring.

Lu Jingming grabbed an infrared thermometer gun from the table. He aimed it at the center of the machine's keyboard and pulled the trigger. "Beep." An enlarged number popped up in the top left corner of the screen: 29.8 degrees.

After fifteen minutes of full-load operation, the casing temperature hadn't even reached thirty degrees.

In the front row VIP area, the Microsoft North America regional director's face was deathly pale. Cold sweat on his forehead dripped down his prominent nose, "splatting" onto the lapel of his suit jacket and creating a patch of water stains.

That massive, bloated instruction set of the X86 Architecture had actually been chewed to pieces by a Chinese system underlying layer. It hadn't even caused any computational loss from translation.

A thirty-year monopoly moat, kicked into smithereens in front of the whole world.

"Fuck!" The director stood up abruptly. His knee slammed hard into the edge of the glass coffee table in front of him, emitting a dull, heavy thud. The loosely capped bottle of mineral water beside him was knocked over. Water flowed down the table, soaking his expensive leather shoes. He didn't even bother to wipe it.

"This is impossible!" The director pointed at the silent machine on stage, his voice cracking from terror. "Translation will absolutely cause a collapse in computing power! This violates the physical laws of the Von Neumann Architecture!" His roar sounded exceptionally jarring in the dead-silent venue.

Lu Jingming stood under the spotlight. He tossed the thermometer gun onto the table with a dull thud. He shoved one hand back into his faded jeans pocket, his thumb fumbling with that plastic lighter.

"Click." A crisp flicking sound amplified through the microphone. He glanced at the foreigner, who was roaring like a madman, and slowly pulled at the corner of his mouth. That sharp canine tooth flashed with a chilling, cold light.

"You think it's impossible? Fine." Lu Jingming turned around, and a blood-red number instantly slammed onto the giant screen behind him. "Today, the xinghai matebook launch price: 4,999."

The audience collectively gasped. This dirt-cheap price directly nailed Microsoft's metal boxes, which cost tens of thousands, firmly into their coffins.

Lu Jingming leaned forward. His gaze scraped like a razor blade across the Microsoft director's deathly pale face. "Buy one, take it back, and dismantle it to study it slowly. Once you've figured it out..." Lu Jingming paused, his eyes filled with disdainful arrogance. "Remember to report the death to Gates back in Seattle and ask him when he plans to be buried?"