Comment by PorciiVorbesc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PorciiVorbesc | Hacker News Reader

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>You can likely live without a new gaming rig. You likely cannot live without replaceable parts for trucks and cars.

Bad logic for an argument. With this logic you can say you can live fine with your 30 year old diesel car that doesn't need these new cutting edge SiC wafer chips, and that making diesel engines is more important for national security than making chips, and so on and so forth till you reach knowing how to make fire, swords an arrows as the most important for national security.

Truth is fabbing CPUs and GPUs is miles more profitable than what Infineon and EU are fabbing, and they're just as important for national security/sovereignty if not even more:

Did Infineon's engineers use EU or US CPUs and GPUs for the complex CAD/CAE simulations needed to develop those SiC wafers? Why else do you think the US got TSMC and Samsung to make cutting edge fabs on US soil if CPUs and GPUs are not important for national security? When you need to process TB of live battlefield data in case of war, do you not need domestic CPUs and GPUs?

Ten years old CPUs are "okay" and there are fabs in Europe that could make them. Faster is better, but slower isn't entirely useless and hugely better than no CPU. Like a 100 hp heavy truck is greatly underpowered, but almost infinitely better than no truck.

>Ten years old CPUs are "okay"

Yeah but in a war, be it a trade war or kinetic one, against a power WHO HAS modern chips and can process data and intelligence faster, who has better leverage? The one with cutting edge tech, or the one with "okay" tech?

Seeing how the orange bafoon slapped the EU around with his trade war and received no retaliation that could cause even paint in return, I assume the answer is obvious.

Another point being how Ukraine can beat Russia in drone warfare simply because they have access to the superior tech of all western allied nations despite making lower numbers than Russia which makes more but can't easily get embargo chips.

>and there are fabs in Europe that could make them.

Which EU fabs make 14++nm CPUs and GPUs? Which EU domestic CPUs and GPUs IP designs are there at the moment that can be fabbed in case of emergency without parts or IP from rivals?

The truth is EU is painfully absent from this field. Sure, in theory they can duct tape together some RISC-V CPU and some ARM MALI GPU production on Dresden 16nm fabs, in case of a war, but since the EU never built and shipped a commercial domestic CPU and GPU from scratch in the last 20+ years, it's not gonna be as easy as turning a screw, as it is for nations that ship new cutting edge compute chips every year: US, Korea, Taiwan and to an extent Japan and China. When you've been out of the game for so long, you get rusty and comebacks are slow and painful. EU would take decades to catch up and rebuild this industry in case of a war cut them off from these parts. It's basically another supply chain vulnerability it failed to address.

Regarding the fabs (well... fab - not good), GlobalFoundries Dresden, and regarding IP, ARM. Or old AMD or Intel designs, because intellectual property goes right out of the window in a war.

There's Intel 4 in Kildare in the Republic of Ireland.

The eu doesnt plan to go to war, so the strategy revolves around that. They just need to be thorny enough to make attacks painful and then sit behind their nuclear Shield and allies

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