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Discussion (55 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
First is "data sovereignty", which is what the current (data) migrations are all about. As long as the data remains in place where it cannot be suddenly locked away by the US government, people don't care if the CPU was purchased from the US, as the government cannot suddenly disable those (as far as we know at least).
Second is "hardware sovereignty", which is what this article talks about, about the geographical locations where the hardware is designed and built. This is obviously much harder, but also less important at this very moment. That's why you're not seeing people suddenly rushing to fund EU fabs for silicon, there are more important things to focus on right now, with real implications.
The article kind of does everyone a disservice by mixing the two and not clearly separating which ones it's actually talking about. But to be fair, if they did that, then they've wouldn't have been able to publish this whole "Look how they aren't actually sovereign after all" article if they did so, here we are...
If your threat model is clandestine government actors then I think it would be a rather odd decision to host on ANY cloud !
The main risk for most people is being subject to US CLOUD Act, US PATRIOT Act etc. etc. Which, despite what the sales-droids will tell you, still applies in the fake-EU clouds operated by the US providers.
If you are serious about EU data sovereignty then you absolutely want an EU OpCo that has nothing whatsoever to do with any US company. If OpCo has ties to a US company or IS a US company such as AWS or Microsoft, then you've lost the EU jurisdiction.
TBH, all of these entities are likely actively penetrated by US, Israeli and Russian human assets. You don’t need esoteric knowledge of CPU flaws or whatever if the dude holding the keys works for you.
But they are two different things.
You can’t solve all problems at once.
It’s reasonable to start by solving the problems which provide rrhe best improvement for the lowest effort and risk.
Prioritizing data sovereignty as the OP has done well naming it, seems like a good trade off to me.
AFAIK, there is absolutely zero evidence either Intel or AMD CPUs are compromised, even less so that they're somehow remotely accessible by the US government...
The concerns are similar to US supplied fighters having the kill switch or remotely damaging centrifuges in Iran using software virus.
No one knows whether CPUs are compromised similar to no one knew beepers with explosives in Lebanon were compromised by Israel, allegedly during manufacturing. CPUs don't need to be accessed remotely, any compromised person locally will be enough.
These are fascinating cases to show how far state actors will go and how long the compromise can stay dormant.
https://catalonia.com/w/barcelona-supercomputing-center-laun...
https://www.bsc.es/join-us/excellence-career-opportunities/d...
I think there is a partition in our supercomputing facility for these new types of technologies, but since my work is running climate models, I only hear news from other teams like our AI factory, the quantum computer, or people involved with these new chips and some emulators (that I think work together).
China already produces government and business computers with their homemade LoongArch architecture. The run on homemade Linux as well. Their point was not only to not be worried as much about backdoors and sanctions, but also to get a platform that their own universities and engineers can maintain and develop
This brand used to coproduce with the French, open source and Java apps work, it's under US sanctions for supplying the chinese government and military, export was restricted so that none land in Russia.
It took decades to make, commercial value is uncertain, but they did master the entire computing stack now
That's surprising. I would've expected most people at a cybersecurity conference to have heard of it, for over a decade.
Is this conference not for people who understand the technology at all, but rather for purely management-track people who oversee the people who understand the technology?
Sovereign clouds are an incredibly meaningful first step. Full independence takes decades. China still uses plenty of AMD and Intel chips, does it mean the amount of independence they've achieved is meaningless? That their stacks are just as dependent on the US as those of the EU?
Of course not and even a child could know that. You start with the very end of the chain and hopefully very gradually work your way upwards. The EU approach of doing things is the way to go.
1) An ISA licensor, with no capability to create its own CPUs
and
2) Owned by Softbank in Japan, not European
I'd also argue that while Softbank has capital ownership of the company, the leadership structure and how that capital is allocated is still done within the UK with standard board oversight. I know a few of the leadership team personally, and they have a wide remit, almost more so than a public company might do.
You could start running things on ARM, but, almost certainly, that comes with a lot of extra friction. (Not saying that isn't a bad idea, it'd probably improve the ecosystem as a whole and flush out architecture-specific assumptions in server software. But it's not someting trivial to do.)
If the processor is mostly idle or running minimally optimized software, which is most software, then ARM offers better performance per watt. If the processor is running highly optimized code at max throughput all the time then x86 offers better performance per watt.
This is an intrinsic tradeoff. To make low-utilization workloads more power efficient you have to make high-utilization workloads less power efficient and vice versa. ARM and x86 differentiate themselves by taking opposite ends of that tradeoff spectrum.
It depends on the code.
x86/64 is looking more and more like the next Alpha or MIPS in many ways.
https://www.techspot.com/news/107073-researchers-uncover-hid...
Silicon level backdoors.
https://www.wired.com/2016/06/demonically-clever-backdoor-hi...
There is the NanoIC research line at imec (2nm), CEA-Leti incomming 7nm FD-SOI pilot lines, and in terms of full production lines, Global Foundries Dresden (12 nm), ESMC (12 nm, in construction), and the various FeRAM/FMC projects I can't keep track of (Neumonda for example).
I would be more worried about designs, because outside of ARM (and Imagination Tech, both in the UK), I don't know any competitive European designs. (about routers NXP already makes router chips with accelerators on top of ARM cores, used for example in the Mono Gateway, but they are fabbed on old TSMC nodes)
And as commented elsewhere, ARM
Part of what got Microsoft into this position in the first place is that they built and sold software.
Now, they don't build and sell software, they sell services. Services means you're buying access to data.
The data is the problem.
There's a certain amount of soft power you have when you can disallow access to data and services for foreign officials[0] arbitrarily.
The old world order would of course permit us to sanction new sales of things, but in the new world: this is crucially tied with current access to services.
I think the easiest way to think about it is:
Would you depend on another nation selling you the parts to build a power plant, or would you prefer to depend on them supplying you the power- in fact it's worse than that because not only are you buying power you're also giving up a lot of information on who uses it, how it's used, and enough control to cut it off for an individual person.. totally crazy.
the EU itself was designed around the idea that if you are crucially tied in this way then war becomes unthinkable. But that only works when you're equivalently sized entities. The US uses this position to bully the world.
The biggest share of imports to EU by value is "mineral fuels, oils, distillation products". It's 17% of all imports.
https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/imports-by-categ...
The problem with the right wing authoritarian types, regardless of regime is that their thirst for power is harmful to all stakeholders. The tragedy of the Iraq War wasn’t Iraq — it was kicking off decades of inevitably escalating conflict. And doing so for nothing.
We, as in citizens of the world, need strong trade ties with China, Europe, the United States and the developing world. I don’t want my sons getting killed by some PRC drone, nor do I want them killing people in service of the dreams of fat old men.
Europe butchered two generations a century ago. Their model makes sense, and can integrate with the world.
I always snarked at clueless CEOs bent on forcing me to sign NDAs while the entire infra _and_ data was living in US from the get go. Like, what's so sensitive I'm going to disclose that wasn't voluntarily disclosed by yourself already?
This is laughable, since US cloud platforms invested trillions. Also, US companies benefit from greater efficiency, know how, cheaper energy and less regulations.
If EU wants to compete with the US, they have to do what US does.