If you ignore the military ambitions of China and the fact they’re openly sharing technology with Russia, perhaps.
I don’t see anything but regret for Europe several decades from now if they decide to start providing China with the technical expertise they’re currently lacking in this space.
This is all about China trying to find a way to escape the pressure of sanctions from Europe and the US.
thomasahle 50 days ago [-]
The EU has to start working more with China, for better or worse.
Not as friends or allies, but there aren't a lot of those left anyway. It's only rational in this multi polar world to have some level of engagement with all parties.
Most of the sanctions Europe have on China were just to please the US anyway.
Teever 50 days ago [-]
Why is it in the interest of the EU to work with an entity that doesn't condone concepts like democracy, due process, or the rule of law?
Shouldn't it be the mandate of liberal democracies to enable liberal democracies and to prevent authoritarian entities from growing power and reach?
MaxPock 50 days ago [-]
"This is all about China trying to find a way to escape the pressure of sanctions from Europe and the US"
Is this supposed to be a nefarious Chinese activity?
bitmasher9 50 days ago [-]
I read the sentence as the US is the nefarious one, putting pressure between two groups to not work together. It’s only natural for China to act in its own self interest.
snailmailstare 50 days ago [-]
The EU needs to build arms to defend itself that the US can't interfere with and knows less about, and so does China.
"Ask HN: How much would it cost to build a RISC CPU out of carbon?" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41153490 with nanoimprinting (which 10x's current gen nanolithography FWIU)
> Called nanoimprint lithography (NIL), it’s capable of patterning circuit features as small as 14 nanometers—enabling logic chips on par with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia processors now in mass production.
znpy 50 days ago [-]
in uk, so in continental europe, yes.
basisword 50 days ago [-]
I've always thought of 'continental Europe' as meaning 'mainland Europe'. In other words excluding the disconnected parts like the UK. Regardless, the UK is in Europe.
The EU was established in 1993. Arm was founded in 1990.
For that matter the UK is composed of islands and parts thereof and nothing in "continental Europe", a term which refers to just the contiguous landmass. (Gibraltar is owned by the UK, but not part of it.)
Luckily Europe is not defined by the EU or sea levels, and the UK is very much in Europe the continent.
tsukikage 50 days ago [-]
Technically true, which as we all know is the best kind of true. Note, however:
“The United Kingdom (along with the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar) was a member state of the European Union (EU) and of its predecessor the European Communities (EC) – principally the European Economic Community (EEC) – from 1 January 1973 until 31 January 2020.”
Compare the start of this subthread: “Didn't ARM start in Europe?”
Whatever point it is that subsequent responders were trying to score by mentioning continental europe is moot: Britain was part of Europe in more ways than merely its location.
Y_Y 50 days ago [-]
Your attention to detail is admirable. I feel like if we allow in the EEC we should also give recognition to Acorn of Acorn RISC Machines which was founded in 1978. So really OP should have asked,
"Was Acorn founded in part of a decendant of the European Coal and Steel Community, notwithstanding certain (disputed) conditions of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713)?”
tsukikage 50 days ago [-]
If people start being pedantic, I feel responding in kind is entirely fair.
TBH I'm still not quite understanding why people feel it is so important to clarify that Britain is only in Europe geographically; but I wonder, does it make a difference that Hermann Hauser is actually Austrian? ;)
Y_Y 50 days ago [-]
You've just blown this whole case wide open!
(I'm really not interested in squabbles about national identity and EU membership, but I do think it's fun to examine claims carefully, especially when it undermines ideological talking points.)
SAI_Peregrinus 50 days ago [-]
Being slightly pedantic, Gibraltar is a British Overseas Territory on continental Europe.
dumbledoren 50 days ago [-]
The military 'ambitions' of China exist only because the military ambitions of the US exist.
Kenji 50 days ago [-]
[dead]
duskwuff 50 days ago [-]
Chinese firms have been moving in that direction for some time now. One early adopter was GigaDevice, which started offering RISC-V versions of their microcontrollers (e.g. GD32VF103 - a RISC-V adapted STM32 clone) around 2019.
briandear 50 days ago [-]
If the goal is to decouple from the U.S., why would the EU want to collaborate with a totalitarian state like China?
dgellow 50 days ago [-]
The US is extremely chaotic and unpredictable. China is fairly stable and predictable.
ratatoskrt 50 days ago [-]
This is it. China might be authoritarian, but it's acting way less eratic than the US right now.
janice1999 50 days ago [-]
That may be in part to their 'president for life'. Leaders are not immortal though and transitions between them have seen large and sometimes catastrophic changes. China designed its modern political system to avoid that, only for Xi to undo it and purge younger potential challengers.
jimbob45 50 days ago [-]
For life and is 71 in arguably the most stressful job in the world. The risk of mental decline cannot be ignored, particularly as he has now served longer than any US president in all of history.
Although I say that and then I went down the rabbit hole of trying to find which individual had the longest tenure of presidency and vice presidency combined. It seems like it’s either Nixon, HW Bush, or Biden.
brucehoult 50 days ago [-]
As the US president is more or less in the same position as the monarch in the UK -- the main *official* task is to approve or reject legislation already passed by parliament -- you should perhaps look at the 63 years 216 days Victoria reigned, or 70 years 214 days of Elizabeth II, both far exceeding any recent US, Chinese, or Russian supreme leader.
I recently noticed with horror that my birth is now closer to the end of Victoria's reign in 1901 than it is to today.
akie 50 days ago [-]
The US is not just erratic, it wouldn't be a stretch to call them hostile towards the EU right now.
hsuduebc2 50 days ago [-]
If not exactly hostile then definetly untrustworthy, they certainly show that they are willing to blackmail their partners. No one can be surprised that others want to get rid of influence over critical products. I strongly support it.
It's like with russian gas once again, even the root of the problem is the same.
One man with infinite power and no accountability for his actions.
Just for clarification. I don't blame Americans, but at least from my perspective, this electoral system is very radical and gives almost "absolute power" to a person or party that almost always has marginally more support. You do not need to compromise by creating coalitions etc.
In the end, it is the fault of us Europeans who blindly believed that any successful candidate would be in our favour and perceived as friendly. Although everyone understands how fragile elections are, this was naively ignored.
LazarWolf_ 50 days ago [-]
That’s a pretty insane take that ignores decades of actual history.
fsflover 50 days ago [-]
You mean the history of enshittification by the monopolistic US companies with the lack of any regulation in their country? Also, forcing horrible IP laws on Europe. More details: https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/
And the history of NSA spying on the whole world, see PRISM.
akie 50 days ago [-]
You need to believe what your eyes are seeing.
Canadians are taking Trump's threats very seriously, as is Greenland, as is Panama, as is the EU. And for good reason.
pipes 50 days ago [-]
"right now" being the key phrase here. On what length of time due you judge stability? The last 75 years or so in China... well amoung other things they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine. The question is if the institutions that produced USA can hold. China on the other hand lacks the self correcting mechanisms that USA has built in.
nostrademons 50 days ago [-]
China has a tendency to self-destruct every 300-400 years. The interesting thing is that many regions of the globe have a tendency to self-destruct every 300-400 years. Europe had major continent-wide cataclysms with WW1/2 in the 1900s; the Wars of Religion in the early 1600s; and the Hundred Years War + Black Death + Mongol Conquests in the 1300s. The Holy Roman Empire lasted from about 900 AD to around 1300 AD. The Roman Republic lasted about 500 years; the Roman Empire lasted another 400-500.
I think the logic might be that China just had their civilization-ending cataclysm, and so they're on the upswing now. Ditto Europe. This is probably not the end of the United States either, more like the Crisis of the 3rd Century. But it's just as logical to look back on the 400-year cycle and think "Better invest in the countries that have already had their crisis and dealt with it than ones that are starting to decay internally" than to look back on the last 75 years and think "Wow, that was chaotic, the next 75 years will be equally chaotic."
ratatoskrt 50 days ago [-]
I'm not disagreeing - I think it's important to see China as the undemocratic, illiberal, authoritarian regime that it is. And it is foolish to think that China is interested in a rule-based world order because they believe in the same values many key post-war figures in Europe and the US believed in.
It's that China's economy is heavily dependent on exports - and dependability and the appearance of stability is generally good for trade. Obviously, this is helped by political stability, which means less scope for the kind of outward-facing destructive populisms we see in the US or parts of Europe. But with China's economy in trouble, that might very well change.
suraci 50 days ago [-]
50 million ?
according to someone's research[1]:
here are some civilian deaths within china:
- land reform killed 1-4.7 million
- campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries killed 712k-2mm
- three-anti and five-anti campaigns killed at least 100k
- sufan movement killed ~53k
- anti-rightist campaign killed 550k-2mm
- '59 tibetan uprising killed 87k
- violence in the great chinese famine killed 2.5mm
> violence in the great chinese famine killed 2.5mm
> they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine
so it's 52.5mm!
that's huge!
ben_w 50 days ago [-]
> The last 75 years or so in China... well amoung other things they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine.
Such an event is also one reason India got my grandparent's generation to leave.
And the one about 175 years ago in Ireland probably contributed to both the (eventual) Irish home rule movement and the writing of the Communist Manifesto.
While the Great Leap Forward's famine was avoidable in theory, I think that the historical examples of so many others having similar experiences during the transition from agrarian to industrial, shows that in practice the mistakes are very easy to fall into.
brnt 50 days ago [-]
I sincerely doubt much is left of those self-correcting mechanism in the US. They are being deconstructed at high pace currently, and not even in secret, and apart from a delay by a judge here and there, it's crickets.
We will see what man made disasters the current (and future) US adminstration will cause. By every measure it looks like they are determined to find out the hard way.
omikun 50 days ago [-]
> they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine
... and they learned nothing from it.
cynusx 50 days ago [-]
It would be a mistake to work with China for several reasons.
The EU needs to be in a position where it can decide what is best for Europeans and not be strong-armed or overly dependent on allies that clearly don't share the same concern.
TiredOfLife 50 days ago [-]
Stable and predictable in supporting russian invasion in Europe.
dgellow 50 days ago [-]
It took 3 months for the US to shift from actively supporting Ukraine’s defense to actively undermining it. China is more ambiguous, with a neutral stance, the US is now actively going against Ukraine and Europe’s interests by siding with Putin.
So if you have a choice between a schizophrenic, antagonistic US, and a China who doesn’t care much about human rights but wants to keep stable international trade relationships, I’m really not shocked if you pick the later
hagbard_c 50 days ago [-]
Most authoritarian states are 'stable and predictable'. When you meet a lion on the savannah the beast is stable and predictable in that it will most likely try to eat you unless it isn't hungry. Step on a snake and the outcome is stable and predictable in that you will get bitten.
It is good for Europe to learn to stand on its - our - own legs, to become less dependent on the USA for territorial defence and probably also to learn the hard way that peace and tranquillity is the exception rather than the rule. Si vis pacem, para bellum. It is not good for Europe to swap dependence on the USA with dependence on China, we're more than 500 million people with access to most of the resources we need to stand on our own legs so let's get crackin'.
Also, let's drop the silly panic around Trump, the man is doing what he was elected to do which is put America first. We should do the same, in a serious way. Not in an isolationist way but sensibly. Stop importing the world's problems, stop with the silly self-chastisement around 'climate' and 'colonialism', stop the import of islamism and make serious work of getting rid of the islamist factions which have been allowed to establish themselves or Europe as it once was - the birthplace of the enlightenment - will succumb to the sectarian infighting which destroyed Lebanon after they invited Arafat and his PLO.
So, 'Europe first' in the sense that the ideas which formed the continent are worth defending and so are people who subscribe to those ideas no matter where they come from. Those who want to get rid of these ideas to replace them with their own intolerant society - whether that be an islamic caliphate or a Chinese-style fascist [1] surveillance state - are not welcome. I realise this includes a number of EU bureaucrats who are enamoured of the latter system and I would be pleased to see these individuals removed from power, preferably by truly democratic means.
[1] Fascism and Communism are closely related so it is not that odd to call the current government form in China by the former name even if they claim to be the latter. See https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism for a definition or read what Mussolini had to say about the subject and you'll see the parallels.
bluebarbet 50 days ago [-]
You're going well off-topic here and into inflammatory territory. This whole debate should probably best happen somewhere else.
But just one thing: while I personally share your take on the political and societal issues, I do think it's unfortunate that you lump "climate" in there, in scare quotes. The climate issue is informed by hard science. America's tendency to politicize everything will have terrible outcomes if climate gets completely caught up in the culture war. Whatever we think about the solutions, we have to find a way to agree that this particular problem is bad and needs to be addressed urgently.
Still, again, here is not the best place for this whole discussion.
genewitch 50 days ago [-]
you say the climate is decided by hard science. You mean the models say it's decided, right?
I just want to be clear what you mean by hard science.
nis0s 50 days ago [-]
For secular and democratic nations, multiculturalism isn’t inherently dangerous if there are principles and ideals around which newcomers to any nation can assimilate and integrate. America attempted that to some degree of success with its melting pot ideals till the 90s, but there wasn’t enough emphasis on civic duty, from either the commoners or the elite. The US founding fathers included everyone in their vision, btw, including Muslims. The failure in any integration and assimilation goals from the past few decades result from enabling unjust narratives which pose America as the only country with the social ills and issues it’s being criticized of, when there isn’t any other country in recent memory with a more socially diverse congress.
chgs 50 days ago [-]
> The US founding fathers included everyone in their vision, btw
Of course many were only 3/5th included. And half the population weren’t included at all.
nis0s 50 days ago [-]
That’s not a fair or reasonable thing to point out given that few countries at that time gave slaves or women voting rights. The U.S. was one of the first majority White countries to give Black men voting rights in 1870, after France did some time in late 1700s. Haiti was the first country to give all people, regardless of race, voting rights in 1804. I agree that the U.S. was really late to enter into women’s suffrage compared to other majority white countries.
chgs 50 days ago [-]
So the vision included a tiny minority of land owners.
General suffrage in 1789 was about 1 in 20 people, almost entirely white land owning men.
20 years later the vote was actually taken alway from many of the few black men who had it. White men still needed property. In parts of the US this property requirement lasted until the 1850s, and after that the requirement to be rich enough to pay taxes survived well into the 20th century.
I’m not criticising anything other than this idea that america was a government of the people by the people - at least until the 20th century.
nis0s 49 days ago [-]
I don’t dispute anything you’re saying, I just don’t understand what frame of reference any leader or policymaker at that time could have used to do anything differently. What country at that time was some paragon of social justice or progressivism? I think the US founding fathers did pretty well for their time, when most countries in the world were part of empires, or were monarchies.
People are more socially progressive now because of the passage of time, and the accumulation of sociopolitical observances it allowed. The average person now is only less of a brute because of the cultural training they’ve experienced, but it’s not something to be taken for granted.
In general, there are very few people (sages) who are more moral, ethical or curious than the average person of their own time. Often times their behavior makes them look like a loser or a weirdo to their contemporaries or society.
chgs 49 days ago [-]
Your statement was “The US founding fathers included everyone in their vision”
It isn’t true. And the idolisation some people have for wealthy white landowners from 250 years ago is just weird. Judge the world on today
nis0s 48 days ago [-]
I am judging it from today—if the founding fathers developed that framework today, Enlightenment ideals would rationally lead them to include everyone based on the progress of social thought up to this point. I won’t hold their lack of social progress against them because they were pioneers for their time.
alienthrowaway 50 days ago [-]
> It is good for Europe ... to learn the hard way that peace and tranquillity is the exception rather than the rule
I don't know if you're being serious here, but this (Ameri-centric? C21-centric?) view is laughable. Europe is well-acquainted with war and never saw lasting peace for much of it's history until the second half of the 20th century.
hagbard_c 50 days ago [-]
> Europe ... saw lasting peace [in] the second half of the 20th century.
Which happens to coincide with the lifetime of the majority of Europeans. War was mostly something which happened to other countries, in other places - not in 'civilised' Europe, surely?
So yes, I am being serious - deadly serious. Most European countries neglected national defence after the fall of the Soviet Union in the expectation that Fukuyama was right when he claimed we were at 'The end of History' [1]. There is a good Swedish term for this condition: fredsskadad which translates to 'peace-damaged', the opposite of 'war-damaged'. It is the condition of a people who have gotten so used to peace being the norm that they assume that everyone everywhere else also considers peace to be the goal and thus no longer need to consider the possibility of ending up in a conflict.
> So, 'Europe first' in the sense that the ideas which formed the continent are worth defending and so are people who subscribe to those ideas no matter where they come from. Those who want to get rid of these ideas to replace them with their own intolerant society - whether that be an islamic caliphate or a Chinese-style fascist [1] surveillance state - are not welcome. I realise this includes a number of EU bureaucrats who are enamoured of the latter system and I would be pleased to see these individuals removed from power, preferably by truly democratic means.
> Fascism and Communism are closely related
hagbard_c 49 days ago [-]
Some explanation would make your point clearer. What did you mean when you combined - or juxtaposed? - these two segments from my earlier reply?
nine_k 50 days ago [-]
Predictable to an extent. President Xi has effected a number of rather drastic changes internally; it's possible that external policy changes may follow.
It's not as crazy as electing Trump, of course.
paulddraper 50 days ago [-]
[flagged]
piokoch 50 days ago [-]
Yup, relying on sadistic, communistic regime that puts people into concentration camps is a great idea! What can go wrong!? For instance trading with Russia, Nord Stream, didn't have any bad results...
Oh, crap, no, we have some full scale war going on in Europe now, because Putin thought he keeps Europe on the gas & oil leash (and he was almost right).
OKRainbowKid 50 days ago [-]
Authoritarian stable regime in the east, or authoritarian and erratic regime in the west. I know which one I'd prefer, long term.
happymellon 50 days ago [-]
Because RISC V results would be something the Europeans could produce?
We are reliant on the US as only 2 companies can make the x86/64 chips. I don't think Europe would be completely against working with a US or Chinese company like Hi Five/Star Five, as long as we weren't dependent on them, and could pull ties if they abused their position of control.
XorNot 50 days ago [-]
Isn't the supplier of lithography machines for TSMC Dutch?
While that's not the entire process, and it would be a 20 year endeavour, it seems like funding the development of local capability here would be eminently doable.
Europe is also the current heavy hitter for fundamental physics research, so attracting talent and maintaining an ecosystem should be much more achievable.
gmueckl 50 days ago [-]
Most of the machines for the rest of the process also come out of Europe. Building the factories wouldn't be all that hard. Actually developing and running a full production sub-10nm process is a different beast entirely.
omnimus 50 days ago [-]
Manufacturing the processor itself is different issue from what architecture that processor will be. If Europe produces any consumer processors like that it wont be x86. It will be Risc-V (maybe arm? its UK but owned by Softbank so nope)
matt-p 50 days ago [-]
Just because SoftBank own it now, do you really think if Europe went to it and said "can we buy half, if so we'll buy $X amount of licences otherwise we'll start (effectively) a serious competitor in risc-v.
omnimus 50 days ago [-]
Again why to fight for ARM where Softbank will want a huge payoff. When you can instead put this money into RISC-V. I guess i am comming from viewpoint that what EU really needs are independent chips that don't have to be the most cutting edge. I think performance few years behind is fine for majority of needs and that would make europe much more independent. So chips for AI no but for everything else it would be a great start.
mahkeiro 50 days ago [-]
STmicro is producing chips at around 14-18nm. ASML is the one producing the leading lithography machine, and we are not talking about ARM, Infineon or NXP. Europe has the capacity to produce their own processors if needed.
cynusx 50 days ago [-]
Exactly, it's just that producing them in the EU is a lot more expensive.
On this, Trump's policy of putting tariffs on chips manufactured in Taiwan makes sense to make it worthwhile to put the fabs in Europe.
andreasmetsala 50 days ago [-]
> We are reliant on the US as only 2 companies can make the x86/64 chips.
The x86-64 architecture is on its way out globally thanks to Arm. RISC V is not needed for decoupling from the US.
bitmasher9 50 days ago [-]
ARM is owned by SoftBank, and you need to deal with them for licensing. While SoftBank is not based in the US, the amount they have invested in the US and US based companies means they are very coupled with US. Investing in ARM technology would have a stronger coupling than investing in RISC V.
This wouldn’t be true if Europe was more willing to abandon international copyright laws, but given the amount of IP they own they are unlikely to.
happymellon 50 days ago [-]
Arm is not a trustworthy partner.
Otherwise they would be more than happy to renegotiate chip licences if they feel that companies have overstepped.
Instead they publicly litigate and demand destruction of all designs.
brendoelfrendo 50 days ago [-]
The US and the Soviets were able to cooperate on space missions in spite of their enmity. It's not unreasonable to think that Europe could work with China on a scientific mission, even if the EU or its member states want to keep China at arms-length otherwise. There's an interesting moral quandary there, as to whether cooperation with a totalitarian regime helps diminish or consolidate the regime's power, but this daylight savings thing here in the US is throwing me for a loop so I'm going to have to leave that unanswered for now.
danieldk 50 days ago [-]
There's an interesting moral quandary there, as to whether cooperation with a totalitarian regime helps diminish or consolidate the regime's power, but this daylight savings thing here in the US is throwing me for a loop so I'm going to have to leave that unanswered for now.
To be honest (I say this as an European), we have tougher nuts to crack the worrying whether cooperation with China will diminish or consolidate it's power. Our focus is now on defending peace and democracy in Europe (and on a larger scale non-US NATO). To say that China has its issues is an understatement (everyone has), but they are too far away to be a threat short- to midterm. Plus China also values international trade stability. So it would be silly not to look where we can (cautiously) cooperate.
Ideally we would like to continue to work with the US. But the US is less interested in Europe now and that creates a vacuum that will lead to new trade alliances.
matt-p 50 days ago [-]
It is what it is, IF the USA is now europe's enemy, and aligning with Russia (cutting off ukraine from satellites, disabling F16s, hummilaiting the leader in press confrences, calling him a dictator in the press and JD calling us "random countries that haven't fought a war in 30 years" are all indicating that's true).
We will forced to look for other friends, I'm not sure we have the luxury of complete ideological alignment, instead a pragmatic but considered strategic approach shall have to do. I for one think we've bigger fish to fry, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" and all that.
gregman1 50 days ago [-]
While it's important to steer clear of political debates, it's also crucial to acknowledge that the European Union, like any other political entity, has its strengths and weaknesses.
regularjack 50 days ago [-]
At this point, I'd rather my country collaborates with China than the US. And I dislike China's government as much as the next person.
matt-p 50 days ago [-]
Because if the US are aligning with Russia and shunning Europe, then it makes sense for Europe to partner with China and break them off from Russia/USA
addicted 50 days ago [-]
If it’s open source it doesn’t matter who the state they’re collaborating with is.
svorakang 50 days ago [-]
Well. I have worked quite a bit with Chinese businesses and let's just put like this: It does not matter much whatever license you think the SW or HW has. Whatever is available will be used and modified to the liking of the customer.
It is common for new employees to walk in with code bases of previous projects they have worked with and there is a great deal of administration involved in ensuring that no one else gets to work with more code than they absolutely need. Local builds and copying binary archives is common practice!
znpy 50 days ago [-]
> It does not matter much whatever license you think the SW or HW has. Whatever is available will be used and modified to the liking of the customer.
yeah, china is just not playing the stupid licensing and copyright game. chinese companies infringe trademarks and break licenses all the time. doing so boosts their business/economy overall so the state just doesn't bother with enforcing anything.
the annoying thing is that we're not really playing the game either, or at least, we have laws that get enforced "randomly". it was recent news that meta torrented some 80 terabytes of stuff (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...) and essentially nothing happened. back in the day aaron schwartz was driven to suicide over a way smaller chunk of scientific papers downloaded.
ever1337 50 days ago [-]
Bourgeois dictatorship vs leninist party state
com 50 days ago [-]
I hate to break it to you but it’s extremely common for Western employees to do the same. I had to investigate what seemed like a new employee attempting to begin an exfil of our source code only to discover what looked like all of EMC’s core code, the new employee’s last employer, in a gdrive folder.
Incredibly common.
addicted 50 days ago [-]
Again, if it’s open source there’s nothing illegal in it.
The point of closed source is that it allows the people doing the research and engineering to recoup and profit off their investments.
Which I’m in favor of.
However, considering currently the disproportionately overwhelming majority of the value is being captured by American firms, and the US has proven to be an unreliable partner, it’s in both the EU and China’s interests to eliminate the profit from this industry entirely in order to promote competitiveness with the US based front runners.
tehjoker 50 days ago [-]
Simple: China is only totalitarian in western propaganda. "Yellow Peril" is a tired trope, it's a democracy. It's difficult to characterize the U.S. as a democracy, and our social progress is rolling backwards.
geysersam 50 days ago [-]
I'm very impressed and fascinated by the Chinese society and their progress. I love the country and it's rich history. But is it a democracy? No not according to my idea of what that word means.
It's a great country nonetheless, people are free in China, they have their own system and it works for them, good! Why pretend it's a democracy?
The Chinese would say the point of democracy is to translate the will of the people into action, it's to efficiently solve problems that people have, it's in their understanding neither liberal nor representative. In fact they'd likely turn your question around, if democracy is merely a set of procedures or rituals without concerns for the will of the majority, the demos which is in the name, why do you pretend to be one?
toxik 50 days ago [-]
What absolute hogwash.
Can you criticize and ridicule your government? No? Not a democracy.
Barrin92 50 days ago [-]
There's currently a deep crisis of legitimacy in Western democracy so brushing off criticism as hogwash seems to me pretty ignorant.
The core of democracy cannot be, in the words of the current American president, to be "good television". If all your democracy does is exhaust itself in staging content for social media, television and election campaigns you have inverted what the point of it is. People don't need governments so bad that ridicule becomes a daily norm, they need it to solve material problems and put food on the table. Anything else is simply decadence.
ever1337 50 days ago [-]
Criticize to what end? Overturning the entire order? Questioning the legitimacy of the state? That is not allowed. But the ideological diversity within the CPC is broader than US Democrats and Republicans combined. And if you actually had a chance to challenge the real legitimacy of the US state, you would quickly find all your rights disappearing as well. No state actually tolerates that. The US just allows a facade of 'discourse'.
tehjoker 50 days ago [-]
It depends on what kind of criticism. Criticism intended to overthrow the government? Maybe not. Criticism about various procedures and goals within the context of the socialist system, very much yes.
geysersam 50 days ago [-]
Deciding the best course of action in the interest of others is different from letting go of power and allowing people to collectively make decisions that might go against your own view of what is in their best interest. Without making a judgement I'd call the latter democracy but not the first.
In this distinction there were no references to procedures or rituals, so it cannot only be a question of that.
MaxPock 50 days ago [-]
EU is friends with totalitarian states like Bahrain,Syria, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.What's wrong with working with another totalitarian state ?
cynusx 50 days ago [-]
Friends is a big word, the EU has a vested interest in getting cheap gas from as many sources as possible at this point and a direct oil and gas pipeline to Europe would definitely be helpful.
Russian presence in Syria prevented this but they're gone now.
In the future we can balance Russian cheap gas with Qatari cheap gas to not be held hostage by either party.
It would be a mistake to build dependencies on China when it's possible to avoid having dependencies at all.
znpy 50 days ago [-]
because we already collaborate, sell and trade with them all the time.
might as well collaborate with them on this as well.
simion314 50 days ago [-]
At UN votes when voting about Ruzzian invasion China abstain while USA voted with Ruzzia and other most despicable dictatorships. Still waiting for a MAGA explain this 5D chess move and explain what the USA citizen won from this.
wraaath 50 days ago [-]
"MAGA" voted in the manchurian candidate. Dismantling oversight, accountability, throwing out old alliances and siding with the global aggressors. The US government is rapidly turning into a kleptocracy.
swarnie 50 days ago [-]
What's the real difference?
I know the US get to have elections but its always between family dynasties, billionaires or corporate stooges. The choice is an illusion.
Lets cut out the middleman and know we're working with a different system for societal structure rather than one that pretends otherwise.
kindeyoowee 50 days ago [-]
[dead]
blackeyeblitzar 50 days ago [-]
[flagged]
regularjack 50 days ago [-]
By negotiated peace you mean taking the agressor's side?
blackeyeblitzar 50 days ago [-]
I mean a negotiated peace. The alternative is a drawn out conflict that either wipes out Ukraine’s male population or significantly weakens the economies of Europe and America or both. Avoiding those things is taking the side of Ukrainians, Europeans, and Americans. Does it mean a dictator (Putin) gets some land? Sure. But I don’t think that’s the reason to seek peace.
Yoric 50 days ago [-]
This kind of reasoning made sense before the 1938 Munich agreements.
By now, we have to assume that giving a dictator a victory will only fuel his next campaign. Especially since it's a campaign for which Russia has been preparing for 70+ years – including exercises shortly before the latest invasion of Ukraine.
rapsey 50 days ago [-]
[flagged]
stevenwoo 50 days ago [-]
In spite of this claim, Orban has won four straight elections. That's not much of an EU power is it?
rapsey 50 days ago [-]
Yeah likely Orban is the reason they threw away all pretexts of democracy. Hungary escaped their power.
tgv 50 days ago [-]
That's not true. If only because the EU cannot cancel elections.
I suppose you're referring to Georgescu?
rapsey 50 days ago [-]
[flagged]
tgv 50 days ago [-]
If it's Georgescu you're referring to (because you don't seem to want to say so): the annulment was upheld by the ECHR.
We cannot tolerate democracy threatening extremism any longer, nor Russian interference. If anything, the EU is too soft. Orban, and to a lesser degree Fico, are a disgrace, also to their own population.
blackeyeblitzar 50 days ago [-]
The EU certainly called for the Romania elections to be annulled and almost certainly interfered with the democratic process by pressuring the court. See these comments by Thierry Breton who was until recently a high ranking EU leader:
“We have to prevent interferences and make our laws apply,” Breton said, referring to the alleged Russian involvement before admitting actual EU interference. “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary.”
Because in spite of the west's propaganda, Xi is a good dictator. Singapore was/is also a totalitarian state yet many do business with it.
f1shy 50 days ago [-]
Is there “good” dictatorships?
My personal opinion is there is no good dictator (ok, in HN context, BDFL in a SW project)
I like no totalitarian regime. No one.
bruce511 50 days ago [-]
A benevolent dictator is the best form of government. Unfortunately though power corrupts and they have a habit of becoming self serving, and very much not benevolent.
I'm not just talking at the nation-state level, but at community, company, sports and so on. There's no shortage of Open Source projects run using the Benevolent Dictator approach.
Compare that to companies run by committee (or governments run by dead-locked congresses) which preport to "represent the people" but just turn into "nothing gets done" factories.
So yes, there are good dictatorships. They're especially good at getting stuff done.
There are also obviously bad dictatorships.
ebalit 50 days ago [-]
The analogy between projects/companies and governments is missing big components though.
- "Benevolent Dictators" of companies or projects have to obey the law
- They can't forbid competition or alternatives
- Every participant can leave at any time
- If they burn the organization to the ground, the worst case scenario is the organization get replaced and people move on
I think it shows that we're using the word "dictator" way too casually in that case.
kibwen 50 days ago [-]
> So yes, there are good dictatorships. They're especially good at getting stuff done. There are also obviously bad dictatorships.
All dictatorships, by definition, are better at getting things done than organizations that require non-unilateral assent.
Instead, the difference between a good dictatorship and a bad dictatorship is that in a good dictatorship, dissidents are eliminated quietly or, if not quietly, then with enough spin that everyone considers their elimination to be a good thing.
In other words, what good dictatorships are good at is PR.
XorNot 50 days ago [-]
Also you can look at the history of the Nazis and it becomes apparent that they weren't good at much of anything except that: so successfully that "efficient Nazis" became a trope for decades after the war despite all the evidence lying around to the contrary.
sashank_1509 50 days ago [-]
How is a dictatorship different from a monarchy? There have been plenty of good monarchies throughout history. Frederick The Great, created the Prussian State. Stuart’s were well loved that they ended parliamentary democracy to restore the Stuarts. Victorian, Elizabethan era were also prosperous and well known. Ceasar was the final monarch who united the enmity between the nobles and plebs.
The problem is we look at those states and all we see is the existence of slavery (that existed in all societies till at least 1800AD), women being relegated to a different social role etc. But it is wrong to assume that any of those were due to monarchy and that a monarchy in the modern age would not rule based on modern values. Just look at Singapore, for a small example of a monarchy ruling based on current social mores. Unfortunately since WW1, monarchies throughout the world have vanished, and all we have are liberal democracies, so we can’t say either way.
Yoric 50 days ago [-]
I'm going to assume that you're speaking of monarchies in which the monarch is the actual ruler, rather than UK, Belgium, the Netherlands or Canada for instance, right?
In that case, I'd say that a monarchy is essentially dictatorship + a (usually) clear line of succession.
sashank_1509 50 days ago [-]
Fair enough, yes I mean monarchies proper, where the government is actually monarchical, not a ceremonial monarch.
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Thailand, Bhutan might be the only monarchies left. (Monarchy + clear form of succession).
Yoric 49 days ago [-]
There's a little fear in France, because the head of the far right party is the daughter of the former head, and the aunt of the rising star. Since that party seems not unlikely to win the next Presidential elections, we might end up with a monarchy in France.
Hurray us.
dijit 50 days ago [-]
There are plenty, Singapore is an example.
goodpoint 50 days ago [-]
> there is no good dictator
A good dictator is a...
ever1337 50 days ago [-]
Xi is not all powerful; no one person is. The state is powerful, not an individual. And all states are ultimately authoritarian. The only question is what form and to what end.
ndsipa_pomu 50 days ago [-]
I think it'd be nice for collaboration across all nations that want to take part.
mrweasel 50 days ago [-]
If we want this to go anywhere, not just super computing, the first step is to get devices, useful devices, in the hands of enthusiast. That means funding projects similar to the Raspberry Pi, but for RISC-V, and perhaps mini-itx boards.
We need these cheap-ish computers in the hands of people who will port software to the platform. Without a good selection of ready to go software, the hardware is pretty irrelevant.
marssaxman 50 days ago [-]
Such things have existed for several years already! Here are some examples:
No it's not. For HPC good software support for the vector extension is basically everything that matters, and the framework main board doesn't support that extension.
I would currently recommend the BananaPI BPI-F3 or the OrangePI RV2 for that purpose, as they both have the same SpacemiT X60 cores, which support the vector extension.
Sadly there are currently only in-order cores with RVV support available. Getting a cheap out-of-order implementation is the next most important thing for improving software support.
Thank you! I've been waiting for a viable RVV board for a long time. Just ordered the OrangePi RV2.
This unblocks me properly working to optimize for vector support in software. OOO and even wider RVV registers will then automatically speed things up, without even a recompile.
Yes, I know I could use qemu, but it's not the same. I feel like this is what unblocks me on the software side.
camel-cdr 50 days ago [-]
> OOO and even wider RVV registers will then automatically speed things up, without even a recompile.
The problem is that there are some things in RVV where it's unclear how they will perform on high perf OoO cores:
* general choice of LMUL: on in-order cores it's clear that maximizing LMUL without spilling is the best approach, for OoO this isn't clear.
* How will LMUL>1 vrgather and vcompress perform?
* How high is the impact of vsetvli instructions? Is it worth trying to move them outside of loops whenever possible, or is the impact minimal like in the current in-order implementations.
* What is the overhead of using .vx instruction variants, is there additional cost involved in moving between GPRs and vector registers?
* Is there additional overhead when reinterpreting vector masks?
* What performance can we expect from the more complex load/stores, especially the segmented ones.
"Virtual Machine" doesn't place restrictions on whether the guest's CPU is emulated or not despite "CPU virtualization" explicitly meaning "the instructions are not emulated". It's a bit wonky and I wish the terms had some more separation for clarifying exactly this case.
Yoric 50 days ago [-]
I'm almost certain that this is exactly how it works in processor design. You start building your compiler before the processor is finished, and test it with the emulator.
At least, in quantum computing, that's how it works.
XorNot 50 days ago [-]
Wouldn't this be ideal though? Emulate the processor we'd like to have and work backwards to see if it can be built?
Palomides 50 days ago [-]
98% of debian packages build for riscv already, and a variety of pi like boards are available
markus_zhang 50 days ago [-]
Yup. We need hobbyists to bootstrap the process. Preferably in schools too.
I know there is Orange Pi Riscv but maybe there are other cheap hardwares.
50 days ago [-]
wg0 50 days ago [-]
It rather should be for general computing too starting with government office computers.
Yeah they'll be slow but nothing can be slower than an x86 loaded with a Windows 11 or something on it.
acdha 50 days ago [-]
Also, even a 10 year old x86 system is fine for web browsing and office tasks. If RISC-V hit that level, it’d be fine for many millions of people.
Paianni 49 days ago [-]
I discovered recently that a Raspberry Pi 5 would be faster than both my sister's and parents' PCs. Just a shame that all cheap ARM boards need proprietary kernels.
fransje26 50 days ago [-]
> Yeah they'll be slow but nothing can be slower than an x86 loaded with a Windows 11 or something on it.
I nearly spit out my tea laughing.
That's going to be hard to beat, yes..
preisschild 50 days ago [-]
Problem is in most schools here you only learn word-processing/data-entry on Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office...
So youd have to convince a lot of people to learn other tools
light_hue_1 50 days ago [-]
There's nothing to celebrate here. This is another sad moment for Europeans everywhere.
> The first phase of this six-year endeavor is backed by €240 million (£200 million, $260 million) in funding.
For this to be a serious effort it would take another two zeros at the end of that number. This is 100x too small.
In 6 years, we'll have spent a pittance, to realize that we got basically nothing for it, and we're even further behind the US whose companies are spending tens of billions to develop new accelerators.
Let's take one US company at random, Groq, they've raised 10x this amount of money. That's one startup. Never mind Cerebras, SambaNova, Tenstorrent, etc. How is this effort going to compete? And they're giving the money to "38 leading partners" instead of one focused entity. It won't compete. It's just a waste.
The EU is still thinking too small. In an era where the US is no longer a reliable partner (maybe even a rival), and where Taiwan could disappear overnight, this is extremely stupid and dangerous.
I don't understand why the EU can't get serious about tech. Why does every investment need to be peanuts? Why can't we pay people well so they don't all leave to the US/Canada? Why can't we seriously invest in startups?
ajmurmann 50 days ago [-]
Who in Europe would fund something bigger? Governments are tight on money and in many countries a aging population is overwhelming the welfare state while at the same time defense spending must go up dramatically and yesterday.
Private investors in Europe don't have the very deep pockets of US tech investors and there is much less of a culture of risk taking in investing in Europe on top of that
Edit: to be clear, I agree with your general point.
Havoc 50 days ago [-]
Comparing cpu centric startups to AI accelerator ones on funding raised in current climate is a little silly.
intelVISA 50 days ago [-]
Speculation is that most of these EU funding efforts aren't for producing viable competitors but industry subsidry - jobs programs with a dash of embezzling.
Maybe someone from Europe could weigh in? I'm probably wrong, if the funding is transparent it should be easy to confirm or deny.
triknomeister 50 days ago [-]
Not completely disagreeing with you but:
1. It is a single entity but composed of teams from 38 different partners. They have a "consortium". It has its disadvantages but it is not a completely independent funding.
2. The "consortium" may have asked for much more (between 5x to 20x more) and was probably denied.
As to your question of why we cannot seriously invest in startups?
- Because we do not have a single funding agency across whole of Europe. Each country has its own funding problems and Germany has its debt brake. So, the funding is not unified. Each country wants to fund 10 of its own startups instead of Europe by itself funding 10. This means 10x less money. EU Horizon projects didn't focus on industry at all. EuroHPC is a very new, 4 years into its first projects.
- There's no funding because we do not have customers! None of European tech companies will benefit from chips enough to invest in new tech. All of them are running old technologies. Car companies are to blame here because they are the biggest customers in Germany and they think of themselves as only car companies. No one in Germany is doing AI for cars for FSD for example. In general, European consumption is very backward and low-tech.
- Europe is finding it very hard to raise capital from outside Europe due to various reasons. Like Groq raised 650M from Saudi Arabia. In Europe, that is politically impossible.
Yoric 50 days ago [-]
You make a point. However, I'm not sure how it'd be possible.
The US has been funded by an insane level of debt for the last 60+ years. Debt that might come calling quite soon, according to Donald Trump's own treasure secretary, iirc, and might even be the reason for all the current apparent international Trump-craziness (well, Trump being a narcissist certainly doesn't help).
While the EU has serious debt, if I understand correctly, that's several orders of magnitude smaller when compared to GNP, which limits the ability of the EU to invest.
So from these resources it seems like they develop a vector processor with Semidynamics out-of-order Atrevido core as a scalar core and their Vitruvius VPU.
In the more recent report they have a vector length of 16,384 bits, with 16 lanes (8 in FPGA, 16 in the diagram, final version could be more), so total of 16*64=1024 bits of ALUs.
Slide 15 seems to indicate that they want to create a chip with 32 of those cores, a shared L3 cache, and access to HBM.
pjmlp 50 days ago [-]
Naturally the next step is to also rely in OSes and programming languages not controlled by export regulations.
trollbridge 50 days ago [-]
There’s a certain irony here as ARM is 100% British European.
omnimus 50 days ago [-]
Sorry to break it to you but its owned by Softbank. So technically its Japanese and ideogically its heavy US VC funds aligned.
matt-p 50 days ago [-]
I see the point but you really care about
- Who Owns it (Japan)
- Where is it headquartered (Cambridge)
- Where is most of the IP produced (Cambridge mostly, but the remainder is in the US)
So if we care about being fast, surely the most expedient way, complete with guaranteed success, is to simply buy out softbank and then bring any IP development that's been offshored to the US back to Europe?
freddie_mercury 50 days ago [-]
And the CEO is an American based in California.
It is pretty hard to call Arm, or any decently sized modern company, 100% anything.
If they feel like offering licenses, I bet European companies will appreciate.
Besides they are no longer 100% as you mention.
p0w3n3d 50 days ago [-]
When I read
> Europe bets on supercomputing sovereignty
I'm laughing and dying inside. Europe has forfeited all possibilities on creating their own chips, partially because of production regime, partially because we were never good in this subject. At the moment the war is already lost (yes, I consider any negotiation for resources a war, whether in law creation or in movement of forces). Therefore, we're condemned to rely on China's supplies, and chips supplied by China will have this
Let's make a thought exercise: Imagine Europe must, for some reason,s impose duties on anything from China. Like Europe says, 'Hey, you're burning too much coal, I will stop your cars with my tariffs.' China says, 'Okay, I will put duties on the parts, chips and batteries you're buying from me.' Now, Europe won't be able to produce any cars anymore. We've seen this already when COVID-19 stopped car production in the EU.
And chips are everywhere. Hence, the EU is dependent on China. Q.E.D.
Or maybe I am mistaken. Please tell me what you think regarding the above.
suraci 50 days ago [-]
I was not challenging your conclusion, just not sure it's against China or the USA, both possible, right?
as for the thought exercise...
I have to say that the only way for the EU to be 'independent' is for it to be sanctioned by either China or the US.
For example, since 2000, China has attempted to develop its domestic chip industry with hundreds of billions of dollars, but this effort never materialized until chip sanctions were imposed under the Trump and Biden administrations
btw, i don't think this will come true:
> China says, 'Okay, I will put duties on the parts, chips and batteries you're buying from me.'
it's very unlikely that China will actively limit export for products, it harms more to China itself, it's more possible to limit export for resources like rare metals
countWSS 50 days ago [-]
> Axelera's chips follow a similar formula as other AI ASICs, such as Google's tensor processing units. The Dutch outfit's current silicon feature four accelerator cores, each with a matrix multiply-accumulate (MAC) unit, a RISC-V control core to make the accelerator programmable, and some digital signal processors which handle neural network activation functions.
This seems very focused on current architecture, which could be replaced with something more novel without the fundamental limits of matrix multiplication.
sylware 50 days ago [-]
RISC-V is interop as the ISA level. No wonder EU and even china are moving towards this US standard.
dan_can_code 50 days ago [-]
Could you maybe explain this a bit more? I'd like to understand better what the value is.
Given the stunningly low performance of risc-v chips that make a raspberry Pi look fast, I'm wondering how soon this is supposed to pay off.
CaffeineLD50 50 days ago [-]
[flagged]
50 days ago [-]
qwerty456127 50 days ago [-]
Everybody who "bets on RISC-V for supercomputing sovereignty" will probably end up buying Chinese anyway.
muxamilian 50 days ago [-]
Why? Genuinely curious
turtletontine 50 days ago [-]
(Jumping to assume what the original commenter meant:)
China is pushing RISC V aggressively, and might be a lot more likely to succeed in making competitively powerful cores than €240M pounds spent in Europe, where money won’t go nearly as far.
I imagine one of the biggest constraints on success here is just expertise. If Apple’s hardware team, or Qualcomm’s Oryon team were tasked with making a high performance RISC V CPU, I’m sure they could crank out something incredible pretty quick. But I have a feeling practical expertise on this sort of cutting edge hardware design is a rare thing. Frankly no idea how this human capital compares between Europe and China, but I’ll be excited to see progress and genuine competition on open architectures like this
IshKebab 50 days ago [-]
I work in this space and I would say it's pretty even between Europe (the UK in particular, but also other countries like the Netherlands and France) and China.
> where money won’t go nearly as far
I'm not sure about this either - apparently high tech salaries in China are not out of line with Europe (both are way less than America).
But China does have more enormous companies that can fund their own chips (e.g. ByteDance).
LightBug1 50 days ago [-]
RISC architecture is going to change everything
Yoric 50 days ago [-]
RISC? RISC has changed everything 20 years ago. That's done already.
Or did you mean RISC-V?
cmrdporcupine 50 days ago [-]
it's a movie quote
Yoric 50 days ago [-]
Oops. Haven't seen that movie in a while :)
nine_k 50 days ago [-]
No, an open architecture that's widely accepted and implemented is going to.
lokimedes 50 days ago [-]
RISC is good.
throawayonthe 50 days ago [-]
[dead]
theodric 50 days ago [-]
[flagged]
hajile 50 days ago [-]
The current crop of cores were designed several years ago before some key standards were adopted. They exist mostly to experiment and allow early adopters to develop software.
Next generation cores from companies like Ventana claim very high performance (we’ll see what PPW ends up being). Tenstorrent has already started talking about an extremely wide core to follow their already 8-wide designs. Qualcomm seems quite interested in the idea of moving from ARM to RISCV and there are other companies working on big stuff, but it takes 4-5 years and the final pieces of the puzzle only fell into place a couple years ago, so the designs are all in progress.
topspin 50 days ago [-]
This is exactly correct. There is a long walk between working ISA and a high performance device that can sustain high IPC. Alibaba has the C930 now, only a few day ago. There are no credible performance figures on it yet, but they've made fast server grade ARMs, so they know how to build high performance CPUs. Then, as you say, there is Tenstorrent and Keller.
Can "Europe" achieve anything here? Anything is possible, I suppose... But given the players already at it, Europe is already way behind the curve.
f1shy 50 days ago [-]
Independent of instruction set, RISC-V processors will have to learn what ARM lerned. It will take time… yes
Jtsummers 50 days ago [-]
Depending on who's involved in the design of the processors, they don't have to relearn anything. Hire the people who made efficient ARM processors to develop efficient RISC-V processors using comparable techniques. This will increase costs for quality chips (those engineers can probably command a very high compensation package), but substantially reduces the time to market for competitive hardware.
ARM just announced they are manufacturing their own chips for the first time further threatening their customers (despite testifying the exact opposite in court a couple months ago).
Since SoftBank took over, their company has shifted and proved that when a standard is controlled by one company, there will eventually be issues.
Switching to RISC means those issues won’t ever happen again.
6SixTy 50 days ago [-]
Choosing RISC-V here is more about how much soverienty a country has over the IP than anything else here. The US can probably consider most-all ARM IP to be dual use technology and immediately deny use of it.
RISC-V being based out of Switzerland, the ISA being under a permissive Creative Commons license, and most software tools being FOSS is definitely why it's being adopted here. It's completely isolated from all geopolitics.
Someone 50 days ago [-]
> The US can probably consider most-all ARM IP to be dual use technology and immediately deny use of it.
“Arm Holdings plc (formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a Japanese-owned British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England”
6SixTy 50 days ago [-]
There are still ARM offices in the US in which their work, IP, etc would be subject to export restrictions.
boredatoms 50 days ago [-]
ARM in stock listed in New York, it cant avoid US assertions
matt-p 50 days ago [-]
So what, there's nothing done in America that can't be brought back to Cambridge or London just as easily as we offshored it.
If Europe is making a serious investment then it has more than enough power to say "you'll get the contract if you divest of X,Y,Z"
matt-p 50 days ago [-]
ARM is a British company. We are in Europe.
zipy124 50 days ago [-]
It was founded in Britain, but it is a Japanese company ATM as per it's SoftBank ownership.
matt-p 50 days ago [-]
So what? Japan are Europe's enemy now? Could the EU not just buy 25% or something?
omnimus 50 days ago [-]
Its specifically Softbank which might be japanese but its very much aligned with US and VC funds. It might as well be VC fund.
matt-p 50 days ago [-]
So what? What's the scenario here?
The USA pressures Japan to stop selling licences to European Fabs? Why, what would push them to such extremes?
Fabs can still produce those current designs (they just don't have licences). Now Europe can buy SoftBank out, or Britain can just walk into ARM Cambridge and say it's been sequested for the war effort.
50 days ago [-]
zipy124 50 days ago [-]
Given ARM is mostly an IP bsaed company that wouldn't really work. For reference just look at what happened with ARM's china susidiary with which this basically happened.
matt-p 50 days ago [-]
ARM China is a sales office. Not the same thing at all.
If a design is made in a British office of a British company, 'by hook or by crook' the state can gain access to it. That's the hard, perhaps slightly uncomfortable truth.
Of course it would only ever come to this if softbank refused to sell and there was some national security angle.
If ARM want to close their office here, then the state can hire all their engineers and offer immunity/void on any NDA they've signed with ARM, if anything that's actually the most desirable outcome.
Again we're talking about things that simply aren't going to happen, and if they do there are much much bigger problems.
3836293648 50 days ago [-]
And non-Apple Silicon is British?
turtletontine 50 days ago [-]
ARM Holdings is British. Anyone making ARM cores (Apple, Qualcomm, Amazon’s Graviton…) is paying licensing fees to a British company.
Arm even tried to cancel Qualcomm’s licensing agreement back in the fall. Using RISC V entirely circumvents not only royalty payments, but legal battles like that (frivolous or not).
50 days ago [-]
3836293648 50 days ago [-]
And ARM makes reference designs which most ARM chips just use.
danieldk 50 days ago [-]
I'm all in for RISC-V, but ARM Holdings is British (and owned by the Japanese SoftBank group). ASML is in the The Netherlands. And there are some European ARM CPU vendors (NXP, ST Microelectronics, etc.). So Europe could also standardize on ARM without sovereignty issues?
omnimus 50 days ago [-]
Why risking doing that if you can go to ASML and those vendors to manucature you RISC which isnt owned by Softbank…
danieldk 50 days ago [-]
I think we should definitely invest in RISC-V, open is preferable, especially in a continent-wide initiative. I’m just contesting that the US could unilaterally sabotage ARM use in Europe.
matt-p 50 days ago [-]
Because almost all software runs on arm today, almost none (comparatively) runs on risc-v.
Or perhaps because ARM is miles ahead of risc-v today.
daveguy 50 days ago [-]
RISC-V is an open standard. ARM still needs to be licensed.
The world is abandoning rent seekers.
briandear 50 days ago [-]
Is ARM better than RiSC? How many RISC computers can I go buy right now at the local Carrefour here in Barcelona? Weird definition of “abandoning.”
6SixTy 50 days ago [-]
RISC-V is probably no different than ARM at it's core. Also, both of them are RISC ISAs.
Right now, you are far more likely to use RISC-V and not know it than to knowingly interact with RISC-V directly. For example, since about 2015, Nvidia has used RISC-V as an onboard controller for their GPUs.
3eb7988a1663 50 days ago [-]
Western Digital also announced they were looking (have already?) to move to RISC-V.
If you manufacture items at scale, getting away from ARM licensing costs per unit makes financial sense. Especially if you already have in-house expertise who can design chips tuned to your specific requirements.
daveguy 50 days ago [-]
Both ARM and RISC-V are Reduced Instruction Set Compute (RISC) instead of Complex Instruction Set Compute (CISC aka x86) architectures. So it's more about the tooling that makes one better than the other. And like all open source, the tooling will be better over time as people and organizations recognize they get more back out of contributing to open systems.
tgv 50 days ago [-]
That's way too optimistic. If it's like "all open source," it will have some improvements, forks and then nothing. There are only so many people who can contribute to chip development, and they all have jobs.
hajile 50 days ago [-]
LLVM and GCC succeed because it’s cheaper to add support to a couple open tools than build your own competing compiler.
daveguy 50 days ago [-]
Wait. I thought the Musk-Trump regime was going to usher in a glorious post-scarcity economy based on the genius and purity of crypto?
timeon 50 days ago [-]
I'm not native English speaker but I think that the current and near situation in local Carrefour would be influenced by “abandoned” rather than “abandoning”.
nabla9 50 days ago [-]
ISA differences are very small. Not enough choose one over another when there are more important issues at stake.
boredatoms 50 days ago [-]
The EU is better off trying to build a local capability, riscv is the best bet as you dont need an architecture/ISA license or dependencies on geopolitics
ndsipa_pomu 50 days ago [-]
Depends on what criteria you use for "better". ARM is surely more advanced technologically, but RISC-V may be a more future-proof decision as you're not necessarily tied in to one company that may change their licensing costs in the future.
snvzz 50 days ago [-]
Mandatory Light/Dark side of the force reference.
ARM will get you power faster.
But in the long run, RISC-V will be the most powerful.
ndsipa_pomu 50 days ago [-]
"Execution out-of-order you want, hmmmm?" - Yoda
johnnyjeans 50 days ago [-]
Not if your goal is to decouple from the US.
CharlesW 50 days ago [-]
ARM Holdings is a subsidiary of SoftBank Group, and so not a US company. In what other sense is it coupled with the US?
xbmcuser 50 days ago [-]
It is not for the rest of the world who are banned from using advanced US technology so best for the world is for China to get to parity on node size as well as rest of the world to adopt RISC-V.
simne 50 days ago [-]
When making sophisticated big projects, usually weighting many considerations, not just architecture.
Even more, some considerations could have more weight then architecture for particular case.
Examples are good compiler/libs/frameworks, some specific software, good support, experience on similar contracts, big number of professionals with military clearance.
That's why some long time IBM won most govt contracts on supercomputers.
But once IBM decided, govt is not interest enough client and after that moment, most contracts won by Intel.
simne 50 days ago [-]
Also in Intel case at 8086 years, very important was large number of support chips, greatly surpass any concurrent.
Examples was video chips, io chips, MMU, numerical coprocessor.
At that time (8086) Intel produced even RAM and ROM chips, so govt could buy all from one contractor, and this is also good in some cases.
cmrdporcupine 50 days ago [-]
RISC-V's vector extension ("V") is markedly "Cray"-like.
China to publish policy to boost RISC-V chip use nationwide, sources say https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-publish-policy-boos...
I don’t see anything but regret for Europe several decades from now if they decide to start providing China with the technical expertise they’re currently lacking in this space.
This is all about China trying to find a way to escape the pressure of sanctions from Europe and the US.
Not as friends or allies, but there aren't a lot of those left anyway. It's only rational in this multi polar world to have some level of engagement with all parties.
Most of the sanctions Europe have on China were just to please the US anyway.
Shouldn't it be the mandate of liberal democracies to enable liberal democracies and to prevent authoritarian entities from growing power and reach?
RISC-V: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V
"Ask HN: How much would it cost to build a RISC CPU out of carbon?" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41153490 with nanoimprinting (which 10x's current gen nanolithography FWIU)
"Nanoimprint Lithography Aims to Take on EUV" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42575111 :
> Called nanoimprint lithography (NIL), it’s capable of patterning circuit features as small as 14 nanometers—enabling logic chips on par with Intel, AMD, and Nvidia processors now in mass production.
For that matter the UK is composed of islands and parts thereof and nothing in "continental Europe", a term which refers to just the contiguous landmass. (Gibraltar is owned by the UK, but not part of it.)
Luckily Europe is not defined by the EU or sea levels, and the UK is very much in Europe the continent.
“The United Kingdom (along with the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar) was a member state of the European Union (EU) and of its predecessor the European Communities (EC) – principally the European Economic Community (EEC) – from 1 January 1973 until 31 January 2020.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_membership_of_t...
Compare the start of this subthread: “Didn't ARM start in Europe?”
Whatever point it is that subsequent responders were trying to score by mentioning continental europe is moot: Britain was part of Europe in more ways than merely its location.
"Was Acorn founded in part of a decendant of the European Coal and Steel Community, notwithstanding certain (disputed) conditions of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713)?”
TBH I'm still not quite understanding why people feel it is so important to clarify that Britain is only in Europe geographically; but I wonder, does it make a difference that Hermann Hauser is actually Austrian? ;)
(I'm really not interested in squabbles about national identity and EU membership, but I do think it's fun to examine claims carefully, especially when it undermines ideological talking points.)
Although I say that and then I went down the rabbit hole of trying to find which individual had the longest tenure of presidency and vice presidency combined. It seems like it’s either Nixon, HW Bush, or Biden.
I recently noticed with horror that my birth is now closer to the end of Victoria's reign in 1901 than it is to today.
It's like with russian gas once again, even the root of the problem is the same. One man with infinite power and no accountability for his actions.
Just for clarification. I don't blame Americans, but at least from my perspective, this electoral system is very radical and gives almost "absolute power" to a person or party that almost always has marginally more support. You do not need to compromise by creating coalitions etc.
In the end, it is the fault of us Europeans who blindly believed that any successful candidate would be in our favour and perceived as friendly. Although everyone understands how fragile elections are, this was naively ignored.
And the history of NSA spying on the whole world, see PRISM.
Canadians are taking Trump's threats very seriously, as is Greenland, as is Panama, as is the EU. And for good reason.
I think the logic might be that China just had their civilization-ending cataclysm, and so they're on the upswing now. Ditto Europe. This is probably not the end of the United States either, more like the Crisis of the 3rd Century. But it's just as logical to look back on the 400-year cycle and think "Better invest in the countries that have already had their crisis and dealt with it than ones that are starting to decay internally" than to look back on the last 75 years and think "Wow, that was chaotic, the next 75 years will be equally chaotic."
It's that China's economy is heavily dependent on exports - and dependability and the appearance of stability is generally good for trade. Obviously, this is helped by political stability, which means less scope for the kind of outward-facing destructive populisms we see in the US or parts of Europe. But with China's economy in trouble, that might very well change.
according to someone's research[1]:
here are some civilian deaths within china:
- land reform killed 1-4.7 million
- campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries killed 712k-2mm
- three-anti and five-anti campaigns killed at least 100k
- sufan movement killed ~53k
- anti-rightist campaign killed 550k-2mm
- '59 tibetan uprising killed 87k
- violence in the great chinese famine killed 2.5mm
- socialist education movement killed 77k
- guanxi massacre killed 100-150k
- inner mongolia incident killed 15-100k
- yangjiang massacre killed 3.5k
- daoxian massacre killed 9k
- ruijin massacre killed 1k
- zhao jianmin spy case killed 17k
- shadian incident killed 1.6k
- tiananmen square protests & massacre killed 200-10k
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42456077
> violence in the great chinese famine killed 2.5mm
> they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine
so it's 52.5mm!
that's huge!
Such an event is also one reason India got my grandparent's generation to leave.
And the one about 175 years ago in Ireland probably contributed to both the (eventual) Irish home rule movement and the writing of the Communist Manifesto.
While the Great Leap Forward's famine was avoidable in theory, I think that the historical examples of so many others having similar experiences during the transition from agrarian to industrial, shows that in practice the mistakes are very easy to fall into.
We will see what man made disasters the current (and future) US adminstration will cause. By every measure it looks like they are determined to find out the hard way.
... and they learned nothing from it.
The EU needs to be in a position where it can decide what is best for Europeans and not be strong-armed or overly dependent on allies that clearly don't share the same concern.
So if you have a choice between a schizophrenic, antagonistic US, and a China who doesn’t care much about human rights but wants to keep stable international trade relationships, I’m really not shocked if you pick the later
It is good for Europe to learn to stand on its - our - own legs, to become less dependent on the USA for territorial defence and probably also to learn the hard way that peace and tranquillity is the exception rather than the rule. Si vis pacem, para bellum. It is not good for Europe to swap dependence on the USA with dependence on China, we're more than 500 million people with access to most of the resources we need to stand on our own legs so let's get crackin'.
Also, let's drop the silly panic around Trump, the man is doing what he was elected to do which is put America first. We should do the same, in a serious way. Not in an isolationist way but sensibly. Stop importing the world's problems, stop with the silly self-chastisement around 'climate' and 'colonialism', stop the import of islamism and make serious work of getting rid of the islamist factions which have been allowed to establish themselves or Europe as it once was - the birthplace of the enlightenment - will succumb to the sectarian infighting which destroyed Lebanon after they invited Arafat and his PLO.
So, 'Europe first' in the sense that the ideas which formed the continent are worth defending and so are people who subscribe to those ideas no matter where they come from. Those who want to get rid of these ideas to replace them with their own intolerant society - whether that be an islamic caliphate or a Chinese-style fascist [1] surveillance state - are not welcome. I realise this includes a number of EU bureaucrats who are enamoured of the latter system and I would be pleased to see these individuals removed from power, preferably by truly democratic means.
[1] Fascism and Communism are closely related so it is not that odd to call the current government form in China by the former name even if they claim to be the latter. See https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism for a definition or read what Mussolini had to say about the subject and you'll see the parallels.
But just one thing: while I personally share your take on the political and societal issues, I do think it's unfortunate that you lump "climate" in there, in scare quotes. The climate issue is informed by hard science. America's tendency to politicize everything will have terrible outcomes if climate gets completely caught up in the culture war. Whatever we think about the solutions, we have to find a way to agree that this particular problem is bad and needs to be addressed urgently.
Still, again, here is not the best place for this whole discussion.
I just want to be clear what you mean by hard science.
Of course many were only 3/5th included. And half the population weren’t included at all.
General suffrage in 1789 was about 1 in 20 people, almost entirely white land owning men.
20 years later the vote was actually taken alway from many of the few black men who had it. White men still needed property. In parts of the US this property requirement lasted until the 1850s, and after that the requirement to be rich enough to pay taxes survived well into the 20th century.
I’m not criticising anything other than this idea that america was a government of the people by the people - at least until the 20th century.
People are more socially progressive now because of the passage of time, and the accumulation of sociopolitical observances it allowed. The average person now is only less of a brute because of the cultural training they’ve experienced, but it’s not something to be taken for granted.
In general, there are very few people (sages) who are more moral, ethical or curious than the average person of their own time. Often times their behavior makes them look like a loser or a weirdo to their contemporaries or society.
It isn’t true. And the idolisation some people have for wealthy white landowners from 250 years ago is just weird. Judge the world on today
I don't know if you're being serious here, but this (Ameri-centric? C21-centric?) view is laughable. Europe is well-acquainted with war and never saw lasting peace for much of it's history until the second half of the 20th century.
Which happens to coincide with the lifetime of the majority of Europeans. War was mostly something which happened to other countries, in other places - not in 'civilised' Europe, surely?
So yes, I am being serious - deadly serious. Most European countries neglected national defence after the fall of the Soviet Union in the expectation that Fukuyama was right when he claimed we were at 'The end of History' [1]. There is a good Swedish term for this condition: fredsskadad which translates to 'peace-damaged', the opposite of 'war-damaged'. It is the condition of a people who have gotten so used to peace being the norm that they assume that everyone everywhere else also considers peace to be the goal and thus no longer need to consider the possibility of ending up in a conflict.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57981.The_End_of_History...
> Fascism and Communism are closely related
It's not as crazy as electing Trump, of course.
Oh, crap, no, we have some full scale war going on in Europe now, because Putin thought he keeps Europe on the gas & oil leash (and he was almost right).
We are reliant on the US as only 2 companies can make the x86/64 chips. I don't think Europe would be completely against working with a US or Chinese company like Hi Five/Star Five, as long as we weren't dependent on them, and could pull ties if they abused their position of control.
While that's not the entire process, and it would be a 20 year endeavour, it seems like funding the development of local capability here would be eminently doable.
Europe is also the current heavy hitter for fundamental physics research, so attracting talent and maintaining an ecosystem should be much more achievable.
On this, Trump's policy of putting tariffs on chips manufactured in Taiwan makes sense to make it worthwhile to put the fabs in Europe.
The x86-64 architecture is on its way out globally thanks to Arm. RISC V is not needed for decoupling from the US.
This wouldn’t be true if Europe was more willing to abandon international copyright laws, but given the amount of IP they own they are unlikely to.
Otherwise they would be more than happy to renegotiate chip licences if they feel that companies have overstepped.
Instead they publicly litigate and demand destruction of all designs.
To be honest (I say this as an European), we have tougher nuts to crack the worrying whether cooperation with China will diminish or consolidate it's power. Our focus is now on defending peace and democracy in Europe (and on a larger scale non-US NATO). To say that China has its issues is an understatement (everyone has), but they are too far away to be a threat short- to midterm. Plus China also values international trade stability. So it would be silly not to look where we can (cautiously) cooperate.
Ideally we would like to continue to work with the US. But the US is less interested in Europe now and that creates a vacuum that will lead to new trade alliances.
It is common for new employees to walk in with code bases of previous projects they have worked with and there is a great deal of administration involved in ensuring that no one else gets to work with more code than they absolutely need. Local builds and copying binary archives is common practice!
yeah, china is just not playing the stupid licensing and copyright game. chinese companies infringe trademarks and break licenses all the time. doing so boosts their business/economy overall so the state just doesn't bother with enforcing anything.
the annoying thing is that we're not really playing the game either, or at least, we have laws that get enforced "randomly". it was recent news that meta torrented some 80 terabytes of stuff (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...) and essentially nothing happened. back in the day aaron schwartz was driven to suicide over a way smaller chunk of scientific papers downloaded.
Incredibly common.
The point of closed source is that it allows the people doing the research and engineering to recoup and profit off their investments.
Which I’m in favor of.
However, considering currently the disproportionately overwhelming majority of the value is being captured by American firms, and the US has proven to be an unreliable partner, it’s in both the EU and China’s interests to eliminate the profit from this industry entirely in order to promote competitiveness with the US based front runners.
It's a great country nonetheless, people are free in China, they have their own system and it works for them, good! Why pretend it's a democracy?
The Chinese would say the point of democracy is to translate the will of the people into action, it's to efficiently solve problems that people have, it's in their understanding neither liberal nor representative. In fact they'd likely turn your question around, if democracy is merely a set of procedures or rituals without concerns for the will of the majority, the demos which is in the name, why do you pretend to be one?
Can you criticize and ridicule your government? No? Not a democracy.
The core of democracy cannot be, in the words of the current American president, to be "good television". If all your democracy does is exhaust itself in staging content for social media, television and election campaigns you have inverted what the point of it is. People don't need governments so bad that ridicule becomes a daily norm, they need it to solve material problems and put food on the table. Anything else is simply decadence.
In this distinction there were no references to procedures or rituals, so it cannot only be a question of that.
Russian presence in Syria prevented this but they're gone now.
In the future we can balance Russian cheap gas with Qatari cheap gas to not be held hostage by either party.
It would be a mistake to build dependencies on China when it's possible to avoid having dependencies at all.
might as well collaborate with them on this as well.
I know the US get to have elections but its always between family dynasties, billionaires or corporate stooges. The choice is an illusion.
Lets cut out the middleman and know we're working with a different system for societal structure rather than one that pretends otherwise.
By now, we have to assume that giving a dictator a victory will only fuel his next campaign. Especially since it's a campaign for which Russia has been preparing for 70+ years – including exercises shortly before the latest invasion of Ukraine.
I suppose you're referring to Georgescu?
We cannot tolerate democracy threatening extremism any longer, nor Russian interference. If anything, the EU is too soft. Orban, and to a lesser degree Fico, are a disgrace, also to their own population.
“We have to prevent interferences and make our laws apply,” Breton said, referring to the alleged Russian involvement before admitting actual EU interference. “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary.”
Source: https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/former-censor...
I'm not just talking at the nation-state level, but at community, company, sports and so on. There's no shortage of Open Source projects run using the Benevolent Dictator approach.
Compare that to companies run by committee (or governments run by dead-locked congresses) which preport to "represent the people" but just turn into "nothing gets done" factories.
So yes, there are good dictatorships. They're especially good at getting stuff done.
There are also obviously bad dictatorships.
- "Benevolent Dictators" of companies or projects have to obey the law - They can't forbid competition or alternatives - Every participant can leave at any time - If they burn the organization to the ground, the worst case scenario is the organization get replaced and people move on
I think it shows that we're using the word "dictator" way too casually in that case.
All dictatorships, by definition, are better at getting things done than organizations that require non-unilateral assent.
Instead, the difference between a good dictatorship and a bad dictatorship is that in a good dictatorship, dissidents are eliminated quietly or, if not quietly, then with enough spin that everyone considers their elimination to be a good thing.
In other words, what good dictatorships are good at is PR.
The problem is we look at those states and all we see is the existence of slavery (that existed in all societies till at least 1800AD), women being relegated to a different social role etc. But it is wrong to assume that any of those were due to monarchy and that a monarchy in the modern age would not rule based on modern values. Just look at Singapore, for a small example of a monarchy ruling based on current social mores. Unfortunately since WW1, monarchies throughout the world have vanished, and all we have are liberal democracies, so we can’t say either way.
In that case, I'd say that a monarchy is essentially dictatorship + a (usually) clear line of succession.
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Thailand, Bhutan might be the only monarchies left. (Monarchy + clear form of succession).
Hurray us.
A good dictator is a...
We need these cheap-ish computers in the hands of people who will port software to the platform. Without a good selection of ready to go software, the hardware is pretty irrelevant.
The biggest problem with them is software. Many boards only have buildroot SDKs or niche and outdated. Fedora related images.
Though if you're experienced you can port your own linux distributions to these boards.
https://frame.work/products/deep-computing-risc-v-mainboard
I would currently recommend the BananaPI BPI-F3 or the OrangePI RV2 for that purpose, as they both have the same SpacemiT X60 cores, which support the vector extension.
Sadly there are currently only in-order cores with RVV support available. Getting a cheap out-of-order implementation is the next most important thing for improving software support.
Tenstorrent has announced they will release a 8x Ascalon devboard and laptop next year: https://youtu.be/ttQtC1dQqwo?t=1035
This unblocks me properly working to optimize for vector support in software. OOO and even wider RVV registers will then automatically speed things up, without even a recompile.
Yes, I know I could use qemu, but it's not the same. I feel like this is what unblocks me on the software side.
The problem is that there are some things in RVV where it's unclear how they will perform on high perf OoO cores:
* general choice of LMUL: on in-order cores it's clear that maximizing LMUL without spilling is the best approach, for OoO this isn't clear.
* How will LMUL>1 vrgather and vcompress perform?
* How high is the impact of vsetvli instructions? Is it worth trying to move them outside of loops whenever possible, or is the impact minimal like in the current in-order implementations.
* What is the overhead of using .vx instruction variants, is there additional cost involved in moving between GPRs and vector registers?
* Is there additional overhead when reinterpreting vector masks?
* What performance can we expect from the more complex load/stores, especially the segmented ones.
The LLVM scheduling models give some insight:
* SiFive P670: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/llvm/lib/Targ...
* Tenstorrent Ascalon: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/llvm/lib/Targ... (still missing the vector part, but there is supposed to be a PR in the near future)
I'm trying to collect as much info on hardware as I can: https://camel-cdr.github.io/rvv-bench-results/index.html
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43309376
Gives you something to play around with, very inexpensively.
But really, virtual machines may be preferable; at least to get started.
And what shall one emulate in a VM ? A nonexisting physical processor ? /s
At least, in quantum computing, that's how it works.
I know there is Orange Pi Riscv but maybe there are other cheap hardwares.
Yeah they'll be slow but nothing can be slower than an x86 loaded with a Windows 11 or something on it.
I nearly spit out my tea laughing.
That's going to be hard to beat, yes..
So youd have to convince a lot of people to learn other tools
> The first phase of this six-year endeavor is backed by €240 million (£200 million, $260 million) in funding.
For this to be a serious effort it would take another two zeros at the end of that number. This is 100x too small.
In 6 years, we'll have spent a pittance, to realize that we got basically nothing for it, and we're even further behind the US whose companies are spending tens of billions to develop new accelerators.
Let's take one US company at random, Groq, they've raised 10x this amount of money. That's one startup. Never mind Cerebras, SambaNova, Tenstorrent, etc. How is this effort going to compete? And they're giving the money to "38 leading partners" instead of one focused entity. It won't compete. It's just a waste.
The EU is still thinking too small. In an era where the US is no longer a reliable partner (maybe even a rival), and where Taiwan could disappear overnight, this is extremely stupid and dangerous.
I don't understand why the EU can't get serious about tech. Why does every investment need to be peanuts? Why can't we pay people well so they don't all leave to the US/Canada? Why can't we seriously invest in startups?
Private investors in Europe don't have the very deep pockets of US tech investors and there is much less of a culture of risk taking in investing in Europe on top of that
Edit: to be clear, I agree with your general point.
Maybe someone from Europe could weigh in? I'm probably wrong, if the funding is transparent it should be easy to confirm or deny.
1. It is a single entity but composed of teams from 38 different partners. They have a "consortium". It has its disadvantages but it is not a completely independent funding.
2. The "consortium" may have asked for much more (between 5x to 20x more) and was probably denied.
As to your question of why we cannot seriously invest in startups?
- Because we do not have a single funding agency across whole of Europe. Each country has its own funding problems and Germany has its debt brake. So, the funding is not unified. Each country wants to fund 10 of its own startups instead of Europe by itself funding 10. This means 10x less money. EU Horizon projects didn't focus on industry at all. EuroHPC is a very new, 4 years into its first projects.
- There's no funding because we do not have customers! None of European tech companies will benefit from chips enough to invest in new tech. All of them are running old technologies. Car companies are to blame here because they are the biggest customers in Germany and they think of themselves as only car companies. No one in Germany is doing AI for cars for FSD for example. In general, European consumption is very backward and low-tech.
- Europe is finding it very hard to raise capital from outside Europe due to various reasons. Like Groq raised 650M from Saudi Arabia. In Europe, that is politically impossible.
The US has been funded by an insane level of debt for the last 60+ years. Debt that might come calling quite soon, according to Donald Trump's own treasure secretary, iirc, and might even be the reason for all the current apparent international Trump-craziness (well, Trump being a narcissist certainly doesn't help).
While the EU has serious debt, if I understand correctly, that's several orders of magnitude smaller when compared to GNP, which limits the ability of the EU to invest.
I also found this report on their FPGA Emulation Platform: https://www.riser-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/RISE...
So from these resources it seems like they develop a vector processor with Semidynamics out-of-order Atrevido core as a scalar core and their Vitruvius VPU.
There is a paper about a previous iteration of the VPU: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3575861
In the more recent report they have a vector length of 16,384 bits, with 16 lanes (8 in FPGA, 16 in the diagram, final version could be more), so total of 16*64=1024 bits of ALUs.
Slide 15 seems to indicate that they want to create a chip with 32 of those cores, a shared L3 cache, and access to HBM.
- Who Owns it (Japan) - Where is it headquartered (Cambridge) - Where is most of the IP produced (Cambridge mostly, but the remainder is in the US)
So if we care about being fast, surely the most expedient way, complete with guaranteed success, is to simply buy out softbank and then bring any IP development that's been offshored to the US back to Europe?
It is pretty hard to call Arm, or any decently sized modern company, 100% anything.
https://careers.arm.com/locations
Besides they are no longer 100% as you mention.
> Europe bets on supercomputing sovereignty
I'm laughing and dying inside. Europe has forfeited all possibilities on creating their own chips, partially because of production regime, partially because we were never good in this subject. At the moment the war is already lost (yes, I consider any negotiation for resources a war, whether in law creation or in movement of forces). Therefore, we're condemned to rely on China's supplies, and chips supplied by China will have this
https://www.techspot.com/news/107073-researchers-uncover-hid...
which defies idea of sovereignty at all.
the war against whom?
And chips are everywhere. Hence, the EU is dependent on China. Q.E.D.
Or maybe I am mistaken. Please tell me what you think regarding the above.
as for the thought exercise...
I have to say that the only way for the EU to be 'independent' is for it to be sanctioned by either China or the US.
For example, since 2000, China has attempted to develop its domestic chip industry with hundreds of billions of dollars, but this effort never materialized until chip sanctions were imposed under the Trump and Biden administrations
btw, i don't think this will come true:
> China says, 'Okay, I will put duties on the parts, chips and batteries you're buying from me.'
it's very unlikely that China will actively limit export for products, it harms more to China itself, it's more possible to limit export for resources like rare metals
This seems very focused on current architecture, which could be replaced with something more novel without the fundamental limits of matrix multiplication.
China is pushing RISC V aggressively, and might be a lot more likely to succeed in making competitively powerful cores than €240M pounds spent in Europe, where money won’t go nearly as far.
I imagine one of the biggest constraints on success here is just expertise. If Apple’s hardware team, or Qualcomm’s Oryon team were tasked with making a high performance RISC V CPU, I’m sure they could crank out something incredible pretty quick. But I have a feeling practical expertise on this sort of cutting edge hardware design is a rare thing. Frankly no idea how this human capital compares between Europe and China, but I’ll be excited to see progress and genuine competition on open architectures like this
> where money won’t go nearly as far
I'm not sure about this either - apparently high tech salaries in China are not out of line with Europe (both are way less than America).
But China does have more enormous companies that can fund their own chips (e.g. ByteDance).
Or did you mean RISC-V?
Next generation cores from companies like Ventana claim very high performance (we’ll see what PPW ends up being). Tenstorrent has already started talking about an extremely wide core to follow their already 8-wide designs. Qualcomm seems quite interested in the idea of moving from ARM to RISCV and there are other companies working on big stuff, but it takes 4-5 years and the final pieces of the puzzle only fell into place a couple years ago, so the designs are all in progress.
Can "Europe" achieve anything here? Anything is possible, I suppose... But given the players already at it, Europe is already way behind the curve.
The _current_ big EU supercomputer initiative does use ARM designs (https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/14/sipearl_rhea1_specs/ ), but you wouldn’t necessarily want to be totally dependent on them if you can help it.
ARM just announced they are manufacturing their own chips for the first time further threatening their customers (despite testifying the exact opposite in court a couple months ago).
Since SoftBank took over, their company has shifted and proved that when a standard is controlled by one company, there will eventually be issues.
Switching to RISC means those issues won’t ever happen again.
RISC-V being based out of Switzerland, the ISA being under a permissive Creative Commons license, and most software tools being FOSS is definitely why it's being adopted here. It's completely isolated from all geopolitics.
The US (certainly the current US) can do that, but (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings):
“Arm Holdings plc (formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a Japanese-owned British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England”
If Europe is making a serious investment then it has more than enough power to say "you'll get the contract if you divest of X,Y,Z"
The USA pressures Japan to stop selling licences to European Fabs? Why, what would push them to such extremes?
Fabs can still produce those current designs (they just don't have licences). Now Europe can buy SoftBank out, or Britain can just walk into ARM Cambridge and say it's been sequested for the war effort.
Of course it would only ever come to this if softbank refused to sell and there was some national security angle.
If ARM want to close their office here, then the state can hire all their engineers and offer immunity/void on any NDA they've signed with ARM, if anything that's actually the most desirable outcome.
Again we're talking about things that simply aren't going to happen, and if they do there are much much bigger problems.
Arm even tried to cancel Qualcomm’s licensing agreement back in the fall. Using RISC V entirely circumvents not only royalty payments, but legal battles like that (frivolous or not).
Or perhaps because ARM is miles ahead of risc-v today.
The world is abandoning rent seekers.
Right now, you are far more likely to use RISC-V and not know it than to knowingly interact with RISC-V directly. For example, since about 2015, Nvidia has used RISC-V as an onboard controller for their GPUs.
If you manufacture items at scale, getting away from ARM licensing costs per unit makes financial sense. Especially if you already have in-house expertise who can design chips tuned to your specific requirements.
ARM will get you power faster.
But in the long run, RISC-V will be the most powerful.
Even more, some considerations could have more weight then architecture for particular case.
Examples are good compiler/libs/frameworks, some specific software, good support, experience on similar contracts, big number of professionals with military clearance.
That's why some long time IBM won most govt contracts on supercomputers.
But once IBM decided, govt is not interest enough client and after that moment, most contracts won by Intel.
Examples was video chips, io chips, MMU, numerical coprocessor.
At that time (8086) Intel produced even RAM and ROM chips, so govt could buy all from one contractor, and this is also good in some cases.