This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
1980s tech CPU
So it can already run Wolfenstein and Linux...
The story of the modern PC is about hobbyist, in my opinion. It was a bunch of tech guys slapping things together, figuring it out as they went and cowboy stuff like writing specifications on the plane on the way to a conference. I understand what you're saying about the limitations around design and production... but these things aren't impossible just difficult.
Maybe a new discovery in physics or transistor manufacturing will be the key to this new era. Or a bunch of things like that adding up over time until one weirdo figures it out and changes the world.
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 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 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. Depends entirely on your constraints.
The case was described in:
"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,""
To which you replied with ”Eh.. What?” and went on to tell an anecdote about how it works well on a personal computer running linux. It doesn’t really relate to the problem in hand here although is neat.
Because those components are (theoretically) sold as equivalent. If you sell me cycles in a data center, one for 10e/h and another for 100e/h (because it's 10x slower and thus must have ~10x more instances) and you don't give me any details on why, I'll take the 10e and of course it won't be competitive. FWIW I do buy compute time in data centers and I'm also aware (but not involved with) https://www.top500.org/ and how none of them are RISC-V based, it's not my point. My point is that the metrics to compare will never make it competitive if we exclude its raison d'etre. RISC-V was never proposed to be the most efficient and powerful architecture (even though of course it'd be nice if it'd be).
It's like apple versus orange then complaining that the apple doesn't taste orange-like enough. Sure, that's correct, but also pointless.
Edit : it's not an "anecdote" it's a proof of existence, again RISC-V works today. It's not set of blueprints. It does compute, easy as that.
So even you know it’s not being used to any scale in data centers. In theory they could run on Raspberry PIs but that’s not useful to the problem in hand. Where did you get 10x slower by the way?
An anecdote does not imply that something is not real.
Starting to worry we're talking past each other.
Yes, RISC-V isn't used at scale in data centers. Now though that NEW criteria are taking into account, namely sovereignty, they precisely might despite their limitations, including performances. If though it's just political signalling without any actual will and subsequent advantage and in reality only performance matters, they still won't be used.
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.
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.
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.
Laughs in ARM...
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.
I still can't get over the fact that everyone is running minix on their silicon.
processors are not trivial to make.
step by step
