EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology

Point was that despite repeated successes with this style of investment the libhurdurians still insist it’s a bad idea, totally blind to the fact that lassaiz affaire is just as prone to degeneration. It’s ideology as much as any other approach and when you find people insisting on it without any concrete examples it’s just plain ideology you’re dealing with and there’s just no point wasting your time.

It also adds the question what ASML has to gain from handing over their technical advantage to some local gov effort.

I mean they can get paid but there’s a ton of other companies not starting from scratch they can also make billions off of so I don’t see why some geographic thing is some huge advantage for EU.

They already operate in a highly lucrative global market with companies who don’t need to figure anything out.

If anything this should be expansion capital or efforts to build more factories locally. Not trying to do it themselves.

But hey what do I know. I don’t have multiple countries with lagging tech interests in mind with lots of money to burn.

> It would take a paltry amount of money, in the low millions of dollars, to design real (general purpose) multicore processors that deliver orders of magnitude better performance than what we have today. But unfortunately lawmakers are for the most part technologically illiterate, and technologists are unduly skeptical of any type of programming outside the mainstream. > > So my dream of a sub-$1000, 1000+ core CPU with a modest amount of RAM per core (between 1 MB and 1 GB) that can be programmed with existing tools like Erlang/Go/MATLAB/Julia and even Docker is just never gonna happen. And without that, there is no viable road to really experiment with stuff like AI, physics simulations etc without renting time in the cloud. We have the impression that progress is being made on these endeavors today, but things look a little different to me, watching them play out at a glacial pace, at mind boggling expense, over 3-4 decades. I mourn what might have been.

I'm really curious what specifically you mean by this. I see similar issues on the software side (my degree is in CS). Software is incredibly bloated and horrible at interoperability. Unix had pipes back in the early 70s, and somehow with GUIs and then mobile "apps," we've regressed. Identity-based security has failed time and again. And only rarely has software design progressed meaningfully beyond structured programming from the late 70s (not to mention the languages). Moore's law has given software developers around over 100M x improvement over the past 40 years, yet ordinary people would scarcely notice.

TL;DR: I see a lot of the same flaws in software, dominated by fads and popularity only of what is mainstream.

I'd really like to hear a dissident point of view from the hardware side.

This is true. Canada has been trying to spend hundreds of millions or billions (under a series of different names and projects) to develop a domestic SV like tech sector and it keeps failing.

Our smartest people keep leaving to the US and taking US venture capital. Or selling to US companies. All for very good reasons. It’s where the rest of the smart people are. I’m convinced that’s what matters most, the people, not just billions of dollars won’t replace that.

If anything it’s quite obvious the US gov should be investing in infrastructure (transit, urban development, etc) like a good gov instead of venturing into even more territories pretending they can compete with highly advanced industries (be that finance or tech).

These governments, not just US, have enough things they are already struggling to deliver on. I really wouldn’t recommend they also pretend they are venture capitalists or worse starting the organization themselves.

Even old school NASA success was a lucky collection of semi-nationalizing a bunch of already successful private industry, academia, and a hardcore Cold War patriotic mission. And I should note one of the most famous people who helped get the US to the moon was Canadian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Chamberlin

One could argue NASA slowly lost that powerhouse ability as it became just another hundred billion dollar gov project. They still do great things but nowhere near the scale or speed as the past.

> The RISC-V foundation moved to Switzerland primarily to help the big Chinese processor companies to work on RISC-V.

Of course. It also removes unnecessary anxiety for the EU that the next ruling power in the US (or elsewhere) may eventually attempt to impose sanctions on the export of the IP. Switzerland, as part of Schengen and Union's single market, fits nearly perfectly into the narrative of European consolidation.

> what gives you confidence that this will work? [...] Where is the EU's micro-architecture design capacity?

I can't see the future, hence I have no confidence. But I express cautious optimism for the following reason: the issue of EU's dependence on some crucial technologies from the third parties is obvious, but there's no direct and quick solution to solve it. The EU can't just turn into venture capital Mecca overnight, the same holds for becoming a low tax heaven. However, the problems/challenges are there, and they must be addressed in the best way under the given circumstances.

The EU has a well-established practice of funding R&D in large areas with non-specific goals or metrics, however this approach is not unique to the EU, it's crucial to the bloc to nourish the interbloc integration and establish logistics between the disparate parts of the market and institutions. It doesn't always lead to unexpected discoveries or breakthrough ventures, but in general it manages the integration task quite well. Which, in turn, contributes to the development of a rich ecosystem. As a tech entrepreneur in the EU, I'm not exactly happy with current affairs, but satisfied with the recognition of my industry's difficulties and proposed attempts to solve them. A failed venture with some new sprouts at worst case, a tangible breakthrough at best.

So far, the EU holds leading position in the lithography systems (ASML). The EU is competitive in radio (Ericsson, Nokia) and embedded (NXP, Infineon, STM) semi manufacturing. There're many blank spaces on the European vertical technology stack, but it's far from a blank slate. This whole commitment is about EU pushing homegrown processor sovereignty across the entire stack. AFAIU, the project puts the focus on HPC as the only specific target platform that needs to be manufactured, but the developments around this project should lay the ecosystem for the boost of the industry as a whole.

Companies such as Apple[1], Microsoft[2], Amazon[3], Google[3], and especially fresh start-ups like Nuvia[4] and Ampere[5] — are working on new ARM-based CPU designs, while SiFive[6] and some others on RISC-V. Also, I'd speculate that AMD and Intel will have to consider switching from the X86 in the foreseeable future. Now is the best possible time for venture into the semiconductor industry in the past few decades. I don't underestimate the complexity of the task. But perhaps a fraction of €145bn would be enough to plant a seed of a viable EU-based CPU semi enterprise; or is it definitely a doomed undertaking, eh? Maybe that French SiPearl[7] or some other company will take chances, we shall see.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_transition_to_Apple_Silico...

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/

[3] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/google-wants-to-dump...

[4] https://nuviainc.com/

[5] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15575/amperes-altra-80-core-n...

[6] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sifive-tech-idUSKCN2571UL

[7] https://sipearl.com