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Comment by rualca | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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"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.

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.

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