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Comment by iagovar | Hacker News Reader

The EU has the tech, but that's not enough. I won't say the whole budget will be wasted away, but I hold no hope of something useful coming out of it.

The EU has ASML, NXP, Infineon, maybe STM (not sure) and a ton of little shops, but all of them are far away from the major players. And they are moderately confortable in their niches. This is a very high risk endeavour, even with EU money.

And as far as I know, none of them manufacture for other end-user players, so even if there was a new fabless company with a cool project, it's likely that wouldn't be made in the EU bu by Samsumg or TSMC.

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> .. I won't say the whole budget will be wasted away, but I hold no hope of something useful coming out of it.

The ECB has been buying trillions of euro's worth of dubious government bonds and bank debts for the last couple of years. Also every year the EU pays hundreds of billions worth of subsidies to European farmers so that they are able to sell their goods below global market prices. I would say that this 145 billion is as good an investment if not better than what EU money has been spent on so far.

Central banks and governments pretty much already committed to drive a planned economy. EU subsidises farmers (among others) to sell goods at cheap prices, which causes consumer prices to drop and in the end the ECB says inflation is too low, so let's print money to buy more gov bonds. Governments then use the money to subsidise something else distorting the markets and it loops back to disinflation and the central bank printing even more money.

It's a joke. Might as well just admit, semiconductors or not, the future of the economy is with the politically preselected winners who get the subsidies and the loans. Risk premiums, collateral, macroprudential regulation, insurance and so on is for the peasants.

> The EU has ASML, NXP, Infineon, maybe STM (not sure) and a ton of little shops, but all of them are far away from the major players.

They don't need to become major players for this program to be a major success. Both India's and China's push for a native self-sufficient industrial capabilities have been a huge success in spite of not delivering a cutting edge processor.

Moreover, AMD showed that right now the key factor to develop a product line that dominates all competitors in all categories, from performance to power efficiency and also price, is access to a capable manufacturing hub.

What? You are basically discount AMD design. The manufacturing and process tech are critical but not enough alone. You need good design.

When you can use the twice the number of transistors and they use 1/3 less power that is a pretty big advantage to work with.

You might have the best car design in world, but if all could use was wood vs someone else who had a crappy design, but had aluminum the crappy designed car might work better.

Not saying this is the case with AMD vs Intel, but right now Intel's manufacturing is hurting them.

"Sovereignty" is an important concept that dropped out of American discourse in the 1990s. No self-respecting country relies on foreign cryptography to protect its diplomatic communications.

Similarly, no self-respecting country in 2030 will rely entirely on foreign integrated circuits. FPGAs will play an important role for small countries, but large groups like EU can afford to go big.

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

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

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

An alternative explanation is that US policy makers like Larry Summers and Bob Rubin are just incompetent, delusional, and greedy.

> No self-respecting country relies on foreign cryptography to protect its diplomatic communications.

I am fairly certain most of the western world relies on a Belgian cipher called Rijndael to encrypt all/the majority of its diplomatic communications.

I'm not really sure what you mean by this comment.

There is a lot more to a communication system than the primitives it uses. Even holding primitives constant, there is a lot of room for variation (and bugs and side channels). Recall that one of the early identifiers of equation group was subtracting 0x61C88647 rather than adding 0x9E3779B9 during RC6 key setup [1 p. 28]. So I guess what I'm saying is nations don't just download AES bitstreams off the internet.

[1] https://media.kasperskycontenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/sit...

>"Both India's and China's push for a native self-sufficient industrial capabilities have been a huge success in spite of not delivering a cutting edge processor."

Could you elaborate on these huge successes in these two countries? I do remember hearing that India had produced a SPARC-based chip.

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