Making chips is difficult, making core chips is even more difficult, and making CPU chips that require an ecosystem is harder than everyone thinks! Without building a good ecosystem, even the best CPU will fail!

Next, we will review how the x86 and Arm ecosystems were established and came to dominate the world. At the same time, we will analyze the current state of China’s CPU ecosystem.

x86 Ecosystem

Today, Intel holds nearly 100% of the server market and more than 80% of the desktop market. Coupled with Intel’s consistent emphasis on publicity, in the minds of the general public, Intel is synonymous with chips, even synonymous with high technology. But Intel was not born this way; its success was indeed earned through hard work and competition in a challenging environment.

In the 1970s, before hitching a ride on the IBM PC, Intel’s 8-bit processors were already quite successful, but there were many competitors, with Zilog being one of the leaders. Its Z80 series products were compatible with Intel’s 8080 and had a high cost-performance ratio. Even in the 1990s, many universities in China were still using Zilog boards in their microcomputer lab courses. At that time, there was also a processor that was no less popular than the 8080 series, namely the MOS Technology 6502. Later, MOS licensed the ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) of the 6502 to many manufacturers, leading to its widespread use. In the 1970s, the Apple-I and Apple-II computers at the beginning of Apple’s founding, Nintendo’s Famicom in the 1980s, the Little Tyrant learning machine in the early 1990s, and the Wenquxing in the late 1990s all used the 6502 series CPUs.

The IBM PC gave Intel and Microsoft the opportunity for great development. But they had to face competition. The IBM PC was an open standard dominated by IBM, where various components were interchangeable. This is how the concept of