Core Cage

At the "China Chip" Expo in Shenzhen in 2023, Zhao Zhihong, founder of Chuangxin Technology, came out with the "Pangu PG1" chip, claiming to end the era of external emulators with "self-simulation" technology. With the gorgeous promotion of "core is the universe" and extremely attractive pricing, it attracted countless developers to join the "Pioneer Plan". Embedded engineer Li Wei was one of them. However, he was full of expectations and soon ran into trouble: interrupt breakpoints failed, complex variables could not be read, the debugging function of the so-called "Lingxi Protocol" was full of flaws, and development efficiency declined instead of increasing. From the spiral of silence on the forum to the official response that avoided the truth, from the illusion of version upgrades to the crash in the stress test, the Levi team was forced to use primitive means such as logic analyzers and serial port printing for "archaeological debugging" to advance the project with difficulty within the shackles of a closed ecosystem. As the sequel of "Pangu PG2" debuted with the gimmick of "AI empowered debugging", more young developers like Zhang Yang fell into the conceptual trap and encountered absurd dilemmas such as "brick redemption" at sky-high prices and useless AI functions. When the capital bubble encounters the backlash of reality, and when gorgeous narratives cannot cover up technical flaws, this chip revolution driven by "simulation steam" finally exposed the nature of closed ecology and conceptual marketing. The resistance and escape of Levis have also become a sobering agent to break through the glitz of the industry and return to the essence of technology.