EU Signs €145B Declaration to Develop Next Gen Processors and 2nm Technology • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by zpeti » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 6:01 PM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #31

zpeti wrote: post #10

It’s almost become normal now that bureaucrats get to decide which social group to spend money on, or which region to renovate buildings in, but the arrogance of thinking you can spend your way to the most cutting edge of current technology is just the next level of bureaucratic arrogance.

That's how we got to the current cutting edge. Research of most important technological inventions of the past century was funded by beaurocrats. Market is only good at figuring out how to make things cheaper and in volume. Both very important things. But true scientific breakthroughs that push the business over next decades happen on taxpayers bill as distributed by beaurocrats. It sucks a bit that it's this way but…

Even if I agreed with you, we are talking about the cutting edge of optimisation, of driving down costs, of doing things in volume. The exact things you also say a market is needed for.

We aren't talking about a military research project like packet switching, or getting to the moon for the first time.

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

#232

Post by avianlyric » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 6:02 PM UTC

thu2111 wrote: post #181

golfer wrote: post #174

Serious question: Why is the EU so far behind in tech company influence/leadership compared to the US and Asia? Europe has successful tech enterprises, but surely is capable of so much more on a global scale.

That's a deep question that is asked nowhere near enough. And when it is asked, my experience has been it's mostly been Americans doing the asking. Here's a story. I was once visiting Silicon Valley for work and getting dinner with a friend who lives there. I'm a Brit who lives in central Europe. On the way over I'd bought a copy of Der Spiegel, which likes to write tabloid-esque articles about the Power Of Tech Firm…

> It also brooks no dissent: one of the EU's "red lines" in the negotiations was that they didn't want the UK to undercut their "standards", defined as regulation. Any country that attempts to deregulate gets taken to court by the EU Commission itself, in its own courts, which almost always rule in favour of the Commission regardless of what the law actually says.

This is standard practice is almost any trading agreement. No trading entity wants to enter a tariff free agreement with another entity which operates lower standards, and thus makes it easy for that partner to undercut their local market.

It’s the entire reason why the US and EU hold tariffs against each other. They don’t want the subsidies or differences in standards to allow one to undercut the other.

The US has similar terms in all their trading agreements, its just that historically the US has sought to export its copyright, tax and drug laws. Hence why most of the western world has drug laws and copyright laws that are almost a copy paste of US drug and copyright laws. Indeed it’s why weed is still technically illegal in Amsterdam. It’s also how the US gets foreign banks to enforce FATCA.

Finally if you want to see some really repugnant trade agreement terms, look up Investor-state Dispute Settlement agreements that the US likes to put in their trade deals [1]

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor-state_dispute_settl...

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

#233

Post by lumost » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 6:03 PM UTC

tasubotadas wrote: post #227

f6v wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly the opposite happened in Russia and other ex-soviet countries. The factories were sold and dismantled under the pretense of “transitioning to market economy”.

They were non-competitive businesses producing outdated junk and in majority of cases there was no other way to survive apart of being sold for scrap. Some manufacturers that produced basic sellable goods survived (steel foundries, fertilizer makers)

Price signals following the soviet collapse were non functioning ( see the current oligarchs ). It’s hard to know how many of these factories could have adapted over a slightly longer time frame or with some slight investment restructuring.

When the price of a corporation falls below their paper assets it tends to attract A certain kind of investor disinterested in long term value. I’d venture a good number of soviet parts suppliers saw their revenues dry up when their clients were dismantled, it wouldn’t have taken more than a few such links in the supply chain being dismantled to break the entire supply chain given the level of centralization.

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

#234

Post by jorvi » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 6:04 PM UTC

GregarianChild wrote: post #223

Nokinside wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. All big players (US, EU, China) must maintain domestic strategically important industries (aerospace, energy, semiconductors, telecom, drugs/biotech ...) even with government subsidies. The goal of strategic investment is to stay as one of the major players in the industry. Being the leader is not necessary, but letting the deep core and knowledge in manufacturing to erode is strategic weakness.

aerospace, energy, semiconductors, telecom, drugs/biotech The EU lost leadership in all of them! (And some others!)

> aerospace

Airbus is absolutely crushing Boeing in terms of quality. Granted, we are woefully behind on the 'space' part of aerospace.

> energy

CERN is anchored to the EU. ITER is anchored to the EU. We are world leaders in wind energy.

> telecom

Except for everyone in the West scrambling to replace Huawei with Ericsson tech.

> drugs / biotech

BioNtech made the first breakthrough on a COVID vaccine.

The EU has many issues, but losing leadership in the sectors you mentioned is not one of them.

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

#235

Post by Eridrus » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 6:04 PM UTC

rusk wrote: post #141

rapsey wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because somehow this initiative is different from all the other ones?

You mean like CERN? Yeah what a waste of everybody’s time that was ...

There are a fair amount of people who think the LHC was not a wise use of resources since it did not give any clues to a new theory beyond the existing "Standard Model" https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-no-new-particles-means-f...

It's obviously easy to say this in hindsight and it wasn't necessarily obvious when this started, but it definitely cost more than it had to because it was an EU project that had to hand out work to all the funding countries.

I am curious what investments have worked out for the EU, but if the LHC is the pinnacle, it doesn't inspire much hope.

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

#236

Post by zackmorris » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

WanderPanda wrote: post #82

I might have looked positively at this if the bureaucrats would have actual skin in the game and would be judged by the outcome in 5-10 years. But in the likely case that this will fail and most of the money will be drained through lobbyism etc., nobody will talk about it and they will come up with the next thing they can throw money at to come across as being super innovative. Disclaimer: I used to work at a company…

Government spending isn't the problem, it's who gets the money.

In the US I see it all going to established players. Which is fine for stuff like finding a COVID-19 vaccine. But is a total disaster for promoting innovation.

I have a computer engineering degree and have watched nothing of interest happen in semiconductor manufacturing for over 20 years. Yes we have blue LEDs now. Yes we have fast video cards. But if you look at single-threaded performance per clock cycle, it's been stuck within the same order of magnitude since the Pentium got 20 stage instruction pipelines and huge caches (which in hindsight were big blows for SIMD and MIMD).

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.

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

#237

Post by WanderPanda » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 6:10 PM UTC

dahele wrote: post #215

yvdriess wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this cannot be repeated enough. Government funding is how a lot of innovations happen, but it's not as visible as a private company bringing that innovation to market. To put in optimization terms, private companies are good at following the gradient. Government funding is necessary to escape the well and find new minimas.

Very well put. Take AI as an example - foundational research in deep learning and reinforcement learning was first done in academia. Everyone knows the story of how long neural networks languished in the shadows, before its time. Even commercial research labs only really took note after the potential of these methods was discovered. Government funding is a good thing, but it’d be even better would be if we could harn…

I was thinking in a similar direction. What about an adaptive patent law? Where the duration of the protection in a particular area of interest can be set by e.g. a committee (with a strict ruleset and a big time constant of course). So when there is not much progress in a certain area (e.g. cancer or nuclear fusion) the patent protection is increased to incentivise investments. A problem with this approach are obviously the unknown unknowns, which might prevent this system from incentivising inventions like the transistor. So this approach can probably only help with problem driven areas and not in cases where the tech innovation gives rise to new problems/solutions

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

#238

Post by lumost » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 6:12 PM UTC

rmrfstar wrote: post #191

rualca wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The EU has ASML, NXP, Infineon, maybe STM (not sure) and a ton of little shops, but all of them are far away from the major players. They don't need to become major players for this program to be a major success. Both India's and China's push for a native self-sufficient industrial capabilities have been a huge success in spite of not delivering a cutting edge processor. Moreover, AMD showed that right now the key…

"Sovereignty" is an important concept that dropped out of American discourse in the 1990s. No self-respecting country relies on foreign cryptography to protect its diplomatic communications. Similarly, no self-respecting country in 2030 will rely entirely on foreign integrated circuits. FPGAs will play an important role for small countries, but large groups like EU can afford to go big.

Sovereignty matters when you can’t trust there won’t be supply disruptions due to war, piracy, or trade intervention.

Post ww2 the US had no reason to be concerned with any of the above in the western world, following the collapse of the USSR this mentality was extended globally with the belief that “we’d reached the end of history”.

As of 2020 I don’t think any major power considers the risk of trade interventions or war to be negligible. The us navy may no longer be capable of ensuring freedom of the seas unilaterally.

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

#239

Post by stelonix » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

f6v wrote: post #214

Nokinside wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. All big players (US, EU, China) must maintain domestic strategically important industries (aerospace, energy, semiconductors, telecom, drugs/biotech ...) even with government subsidies. The goal of strategic investment is to stay as one of the major players in the industry. Being the leader is not necessary, but letting the deep core and knowledge in manufacturing to erode is strategic weakness.

Exactly the opposite happened in Russia and other ex-soviet countries. The factories were sold and dismantled under the pretense of “transitioning to market economy”.

Most of the time with countries not directly aligned to the west, the preaching is for us to sell our strategic industries in name of liberalism and "economic openness", usually spreading lies and misinformation about the company's efficiency. When it's the other way around, it's protectionism and good old Keynesian economics: China can't buy that company, their 5g is evil etc.

I know this first-hand because it has happened to my country each and every time an US backed president was elect. It's happening right now, they're attempting to sell our only semiconductor company.

The Soviet Union was destroyed from within much the same way the 2010s arab springs/ukraine and more recently also tried with HK.

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

#240

Post by mschuster91 » Fri, Jan 01, 2021, 6:17 PM UTC

Lionga wrote: post #171

mschuster91 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not familiar with successful EU initiative. The EU Cohesion Fund is one. Since 2007, ~133 billion € got invested in the poorer countries of the EU to improve trans-european traffic infrastructure (TEN, aka road, rail, waterways) and environmental projects (e.g. villages hooked up to proper sewage pipes with treatment plants at the end, instead of dumping sewage to the groundwater / into rivers and seas).

Yet after spending 133 billion € the vast majority of Romanian, Bulgarian and many more countries villages do not have sewage pipes for example

In Croatia, they did, just saw a big sign in the hood when I went there for a funeral in the summer (which is what actually inspired me to write this comment).