LPU (1)
Three months after the production order had been placed with TSMC.
"Illys. So how exactly do you fire an Ice Arrow?"
Through the smartphone screen, Illys gathered a blue light at her fingertips.
"Ice Arrow is a technique where focused control matters more than almost any other basic elemental spell. First, you draw mana up from the heart. Mana flows through the body like blood."
A tiny point of blue light condensed at her fingertip and rang with cold.
"Now you have to convert that mana into the ice attribute. For that, you need a basic magic formula."
She traced a simple rune in the air with one finger.
In an instant the blue light turned sharp and chill, and white frost beaded on her fingertip.
"Once the attribute has shifted, you lock it into a form. An arrow shape is stable and the most efficient for flight."
A transparent ice crystal stretched long and formed a keen arrowhead. In Illys's hand, a single gleaming ice arrow was complete.
"Last step is the launch. Open a magic circle and release the compressed mana — the arrow cuts through the air and flies."
Illys thrust her hand forward.
"Yap!"
Shuk!
The ice arrow flashed and shot free. A low thrum filled the air as white frost scattered on the wind. The arrow buried itself in a wooden target and burst into ice shards.
Illys dusted off her hands and smiled.
"That is the complete process for Ice Arrow. The core is converting mana to the ice attribute and stabilizing the form."
"Whoa! That was amazing! Like a scene from a movie. The kind with a beautiful mage casting spells. Hollywood could film that."
"Beau…tiful?"
"Of course."
"Hehe!"
Illys gave a prim little smile and tucked her hair behind her ear.
I had been learning magic from Illys. "Learning" was generous — it was closer to watching — but after three months of secondhand experience, I still could not cast anything, yet the basic concepts had settled into place.
I could not do it myself, but magicians formed a mana circuit in the heart. Then they used a little mana to construct a formula. After that they shoved a large volume of mana through it and forced the mana's nature to change according to the formula. The result might be an Ice Arrow, or some other spell entirely.
There was the PCB board Illys had sent me, loaded with illusion magic. The fact that it worked on Earth suggested magic was not completely impossible here. Even if three months of study had left me unable to cast, I still held a quiet hope that if I kept at it long enough I might reach at least one circle. And even if I never became a mage, I was turning over the question of whether there might be a way to use the artifacts the Nano World sent over. If those could be mass-produced, the payoff would be staggering.
"Oh no. Look at the time already. Shall we stop today's lesson here?"
"Yes! See you tomorrow."
"All right. See you tomorrow."
The same routine, repeated every day for the past three months.
1. Teach Illys about semiconductors.
2. Learn magic from Illys.
3. Study semiconductors with Dr. Han Woo-seok.
4. Handle company work.
At first I had studied with Dr. Han and then taught Illys, but it felt cleaner to keep Illys-time and company-time separate. The days flew past in a blur of activity.
Knock knock.
"Yes. Come in."
Dr. Han Woo-seok appeared in the doorway.
"Good afternoon."
The book tucked under his arm was impressively thick.
"Oof… Dr. Han. This textbook is a bit of a doorstop."
"At least this one is in Korean, isn't it? A little further along and you'll have to switch to the English originals."
He looked at me the way a professor looks at a brand-new graduate student. The material was hard, but quitting was not an option. I was the CEO of a semiconductor research institute. Still, doing it every single day had made it strangely familiar. The power of routine.
"Dr. Han. So bandwidth for a CPU is basically the speed at which it exchanges data with RAM, right?"
"That's right. You're progressing quickly."
"Thank you."
Dr. Han always praised me. Even I had to admit I was studying pretty hard. People always said you needed an owner's mindset. That you only grew when you worked with an owner's mindset. Well, I had one. I owned one hundred percent of the corporate shares, after all.
"So if a CPU has sixteen gigs of bandwidth, you could connect four four-gig RAM modules to it."
"Correct."
"If the CPU has sixteen gigs of bandwidth and you only stick a single four-gig RAM on it, the CPU finishes calculating and sits idle. But you can't just slap RAM in because it's bored, right?"
"Exactly. Especially now that everything is shifting toward AI, RAM performance has become even more critical."
"Because it's not that you're solving one extremely hard problem — you're solving a huge number of problems that aren't that hard individually?"
"As expected… you finally sound like the head of a semiconductor research institute."
"I've always been the head of a semiconductor research institute, though?"
"Well… at the beginning……"
"Heh. That bad?"
"About undergrad level."
"And now?"
"Hmm… master's coursework?"
"Heh. I'm a high-school graduate, you know."
"Ah……"
I had dropped out in my first year of university, so yes — high-school graduate. Was a high-school graduate even allowed to run a semiconductor research institute? Then again, those American CEOs who dropped out of Harvard and founded tech companies were high-school graduates in the end, too. Not so different from me.
Knock knock.
"Yes. Come in."
Secretary Hwang entered, her hair parted with the neat precision of a flight attendant. I had never once seen that front lock of hair so much as twitch.
"Sir. The shipment from Taiwan has arrived."
"Oh! Let's go right away. Dr. Han, we'll continue later. This is absolutely not because I don't want to study."
"Of course, of course. Let's go."
Dr. Han Woo-seok was just as interested. These would be the first semiconductors he had received since joining JH Research. Not only him — every employee in the building felt the same. Today was the day a large volume of chips would enter the company for the first time.
"Whoa! Is that it?"
Several vehicles stood in front of the building. A police car led the convoy; in the middle sat a massive container truck, surrounded by escort vehicles. The cargo was in the container truck; the rest were security.
When the container doors opened, silver boxes were packed tight inside.
"Ohh… the goods we've been waiting for!"
The semiconductor masks we had entrusted to Taiwan had returned as finished products.
Whiiirrr.
The truck's lift lowered the enormous crates one by one.
"Sir."
An employee pulled a small box from one of the large crates and brought it over.
"Wow! So this is our chip?"
"Yes!"
I opened the box carefully. Employees who had not dared open one themselves crowded in. Because I was sitting in a wheelchair, their heads formed a circle above me.
"All right. Unboxing."
"Wait! Hang on!"
"What is it?"
"Something like this has to be filmed!"
At that, four or five cameras swung toward me.
"Ready?"
"Yes!"
I hammed it up like an unboxing YouTuber.
"Everyone. You've waited a long time. Fresh off the line from TSMC — not a CPU, not a GPU, but a bio-mimetic processing unit modeled on the human brain! Opening the box of the Life Processing Unit — the LPU!"
"Waaaaah!"
The employees clustered around me did their best impression of a studio audience.
The box had a perforated line for easy opening.
Rrrrip!
Inside, the contents were wrapped in silver foil.
"This is anti-static packaging."
I peeled the foil away, and the LPU, sealed in plastic, revealed itself. The plastic was clear, so the chip inside showed through perfectly. I held it up, plastic and all, for the cameras.
"Take a look at this beauty. A black square labeled JH-1. First creation of JH Research. I am getting goosebumps."
I started with the physical form.
"As you can see, it's roughly three centimeters on each side. Thickness is about one millimeter — very thin. And it's not just the LPU chip alone; as you can see, it's mounted on a green PCB module."
The PCB was a thin green board. Selling bare chips without mounting them was rare. A chip was usually about a millimeter thick; if you sold and used it like that, it would snap easily. Bare dies were handled at research labs or foundry floors. Normally they came mounted on green circuit boards like this, or for ordinary consumers they were bulked out into a complete package with extra components.
"On this PCB module we have our LPU, and you can connect RAM to these terminals here."
A specification sheet lay in the box. I held it up so the cameras could catch it.
"All right. Shall we look at our LPU's performance?"
LPU — Life Processing Unit (Bio-mimetic)
Transistor Count:1 trillion
Memory Bandwidth:1 PB/s
Power Consumption:⅓ of latest high-performance GPUs
"Can you see that? Bandwidth of one petabyte per second, and power draw only one-third of existing top-tier products."
A murmur ran through the circle. The people around me worked at a semiconductor research institute; they understood exactly what those numbers meant.
"Dr. Han Woo-seok?"
"Yes!"
"What is PB/s? Explain it for the viewers at home."
"It's the speed at which the LPU can communicate with RAM. Ten to the fifteenth bytes per second."
"One kilobyte is a thousand bytes. Keep multiplying by a thousand and you get mega, giga, tera, petabyte. A photo is about one megabyte, so a petabyte means you could send a billion photos in a second. A one-gigabyte movie? A million of them per second."
It was a monstrous speed.
"The gaming PCs you use right now max out at a few dozen GB/s of bandwidth, a hundred at most. Even the latest HBM3 memory in supercomputers is measured in TB/s."
I held the LPU up to the camera.
"But this LPU? A thousand times a terabyte. At that point it's basically a data black hole."
I rested my chin on my hand.
"Hmm… now there's a question. How much should we sell it for? There is no processing unit on the market that operates in the petabyte range. Ours is the first."
I smiled into the cameras.
"So please purchase the world's first petabyte-class central processing unit. Price is market rate! Contact JH Research. That's all for now~"
I waved the cameras off.
"Ran Zhao-ming?"
"Yes."
"Upload a clean cut of the video to the company homepage. And there should be tech journalists out there. Leak them the source and get articles written."
"Understood."
Not every reporter covered politics or entertainment. There were tech journalists, and more than a few of them had been waiting with their ears pricked for whatever JH Research would drop next. When the product was this good, scattering a little bait was enough — the articles would write themselves.
Dr. Han Woo-seok still had not taken his eyes off the specification sheet.
"What is it?"
"I never expected the performance to reach the petabyte range. A whole petabyte… it's enormous."
"Right? It'll sell for a fortune, won't it?"
"Obviously, but……"
He trailed off.
"But?"
"The processing unit's bandwidth is a petabyte, yet no memory that can connect to it will keep up. Even the best memory these days tops out at a few terabytes. You can't just bolt a thousand RAM sticks onto the LPU."
"Is that so?"
"Yes. No commercial RAM, no HBM on the market will do it. No matter how fast the chip digests data, it's like trying to eat a meal with a toothpick."
Honestly — for a PhD, his thinking was a little short.
"Then just use a ladle."
"Where would you even find a ladle like… ah!"
He had finally caught on. We shouted at the same time.
"The Blue Tower!"
"The Blue Tower!"
Dr. Han exhaled in pure admiration.
"Ahh… so that was the picture all along! Put the LPU in the center, and raise Blue Towers beside it?"
I gave a slight smile and tipped my head.
"Ahh… a petabyte-class central processing unit ringed by Blue Tower HBM two thousand times faster……"
Dr. Han's whole body trembled.
"A mon…ster."