I am not saying this is not an issue, but it feels like the article is at best misunderstanding what sovereign cloud brings even with an ME backdoor under it and how international relations work.
The real tech revolution won’t be until we can make our own hardware ; enthusiast designed and made processors and semiconductors using consumer grade tools, similar to how you could make your own metal chains out of tools at the hardware store. Until then we’ll be beholden to the billionaire class to grant us access. What I’m saying is we need to make it cheaper and easier to make computers in the first place. No amount software is gonna save you if you don’t have independent hardware.
Modern CPU and GPUs are the pinnacle of human creation. Each step, from design to build is resting on the foundation of decades of learnings and millions of hours of highly trained and educated individuals. All of this knowledge and talent is guarded. I don’t think you fathom the scale of which you discuss. At best we can play around as aggregated hobbiest and make perhaps a 1980s tech CPU.
I don’t think you understand just how difficult that would be. The reason Taiwan has become such a hotly contested area between China and literally the rest of the world is because they have built up the infrastructure to produce processors and memory. Which includes huge clean rooms to prevent contamination by the air we’ve so completely polluted since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
This article doesn’t even mention ASML so I consider it pretty moot.
ASML is the leading international semiconductor machine supplier and is a Dutch company.
Who follow American export rules
For now
ASML is still a company that wants to sell its stuff and until EU starts building cutting edge chip fabs, the company will go where the market is, which is not in EU (except that one TSMC fab that is being built).
To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Actually a good step in the right direction, but it’s not the end.
RISC-V already exists so why not build on that?
It said RISC-V is decades away
“There is no immediate solution. RISC-V, the open source processor architecture European sovereignty advocates point to as a long-term alternative, remains years from competitive performance in datacenter workloads. “It will take decades,””
RISC-V is decades away
Eh… what? I have a RISC-V SBC and it just works, running Debian on it in minutes of setup and it cost me peanuts.
Sure it’s not a state of the art CPU … and if I wanted to run anything demanding on it, I’d have to be patient. Heck it’s not even made in the EU but in China… but it works, today, it just depends on what your workload is. So yes it’s not the fastest or has the best efficiency but still, it exists already.
What does that tell you about its performance under datacenter workloads?
Nothing because it depends on the workload? I mean if you run a static Website to few people it’s more than enough. If you’re trying to predict weather or render high definition 3D graphics in real-time it’s not… but also nothing is so…
Was it a rhetorical question and if so what were you implying?
It was a rhetorical question. I wish all good for that architechture, but it doesn’t seem very competitive as for now.
Depends entirely on the metrics you use for comparison. In terms of performances yes of course it’s slower than others, nobody is contesting that. In terms of openness it fairs better than most. My point was solely that it’s usable for some use cases and thus that it’s not a theoretical architecture in 2026. It works. Yes it’s slow but for use use cases it doesn’t matter.
If you don’t care for openness then it’s not competitive. Being competitive depends entirely on your constraints.
RISC-V is more like 1-3 years away from CPUs existing that have competitive performance in datacenter workloads. Not decades.
But they won’t be manufactured in Europe. Getting fabs up and running is indeed something that takes a very long time.
RISC-V is more like 1-3 years away from CPUs existing that have competitive performance in datacenter workloads. Not decades
I’ve been hearing this for the past five years.
People seem to forget that if one arch moves forward, so do every single competitor out there.
RISC-V isn’t in the same scenario. There’s one company behind ARM with a few external companies with architecture licenses (who doesn’t share their contributions), and ARM competes mostly just on the same commercial terms so for a long time it wasn’t worth investing in single core performance because they could instead fill the efficiency niche.
Also there’s more knowledge on how to build high performance cores. Doesn’t mean it’s trivial, but it means the lead isn’t several decades. With enough investment you can make it happen faster. And there’s a national security motivation for investing.
That may be so (hopefully), I’m just a layman quoting an expert.
I’ve been saying it for years, we need to produce our own chips.
Yes. We even have critical companies in the supply chain of chip manufacturing based in Europe, so it’s definitely possible. It doesn’t even need to be as high performing as the big ones. I’d buy it anyway.
Laughs in ARM…
Goodacre catalogues this and related scenarios in a 37-page risk assessment prepared for CISOs evaluating Intel vPro hardware connected to corporate networks. Its conclusion is blunt: connecting an untouched-ME device to corporate resources “exposes the organization to a class of compromise that defeats the host security stack in its entirety.”
I hear a lot of concern about backdoors in Chinese hardware but this is just dystopian.
I’m convinced that all the “China is tracking you!!” is a giant deflection for how much the US is tracking.
They have always been the worst offender, and Snowden was only a warning for something that has been going on for many years.
also how Palantir is so integrated into us intelligence 10+years now, plus thier use of AI ISRAEL AND ukraine.
less of a concern than having palantir, us back surveillance built into western ones.
It is almost like non technical people who can not follow technical advice are making all the decisions.
I have managers at my work having meetings on how they are going to rollout win11 and intune. They want to tell the technical people how it’s going to work.
nah it’s not that simple. it’s mostly about cost. chip manufacturing is hella expensive and developing new chip manufacturing techniques is even more expensive. it’s cheaper to do it all in one place in taiwan instead of every country opening its own chip manufacturers. it’s only now due to security considerations that this is changing, but it takes 10 years to build a chip manufacturing site somewhere.
Germany is leading in optical computing. Simply why should the EU now invest in a soon to be obsolete technology?
hah, calling silicon-based computing “soon to be obsolete” is surely something ;-)
it’s like calling solar energy a “soon to be obsolete” technology because surely we’ll invent fusion power / small modular reactors in a few years. how many SMRs have been deployed so far?
where can i buy these optical computers today?
You can order them here: https://qant.com/photonic-computing/
Does It even run Doom?
sounds like it’s a domain-specific processor. can it do what a CPU does? generic work with many if-statements?
Would that it were so simple.
processors are not trivial to make.
I still can’t get over the fact that everyone is running minix on their silicon.
You take your choice: Mossad or the PLA.
Anyone who wouldn’t go with China over Amerisrael a million times over is simply a victim of unbelievable volume of propaganda.
The US is by far the single worst, most oppressive country on the planet and it isn’t even close.
They also forgot about the software.
Ah yes of course, only real Americans know how to write good software - like Windows and Teams. /s
That’s not what I’m saying. They forgot that cloud compute isn’t the only area where America holds EU by the balls. It’s also the software. You can set up 500 data centers all over Europe and companies still won’t migrate away from M365 or GWorkspace. Cloud compute is good, but there also needs to be an effort to reverse engineer American technology and start offering alternatives.
reverse engineer American technology
Like what? Which technology are you talking about?
Many companies are currently migrating away from MS/Google. LibreOffice, Collabora, LaTeX, …
Is latex really an alternative? Sure it is, but it’s not very user friendly, which makes that it can’t be a larg scale alternative.
Example from a friend: He is working in construction planning, and they also have to locally check that everything is being constructed as planned. They have to create protocols for all these visits. These protocols are mostly text and pictures, need to always have the same layout and of course they need the company branding etc.
In word they always had to make sure that everything was fine. After they switched to Latex they can now simply write their text there (in an extra tex file that gets imported by the main.tex file, the extra tex file is basically empty). All they need are two commands: \section (and \subsection, \subsubsection) - those are pre-defined but sometimes need minor adjustments, and \begin{figure} (gets autocompleted and they just have to adjust width, path to file, caption, label).
Obviously for people who finished a technical school or studied at a technical university this switch was super easy. And now they never have to worry about formatting again, they just write their protocol, compile, done.
(and in Overleaf they can collaborate and compiling is a button on the GUI or gets triggered by ctrl s)
That’s a good and inspiring example. Thanks for sharing.
Europe, especially Germany, has been very vocal and very active, a making sure that their software is sovereign.
if it is open source it doesn’t matter.
step by step
