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Comment by grabcocque | Hacker News Reader

We all benefit when AMD is a player.

And this player is fighting HARD right now. Me gusta.

I dearly hope enough customers will flock to Ryzen to give AMD just enough energy to rest a bit then keep running.

I've long been thinking that it would make sense for e.g. US+EU to fund AMD just in order to get some actual competition going.

But would they have the same incentive to take risks? I hear you -- I want them to do well too, and keep making cool things, but giving them too much help may kill the golden eggs. Or something.

What golden eggs?

We are (or were) rapidly approaching a point where Intel would be the only PC, laptop, and server processor worth considering. If that happened, their only competition would have been themselves, the remnants of AMD, and start-ups who would be behind by hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure.

In that situation, would they be likely to keep developing new processors, making them more efficient and more powerful, investing heavily into R&D, and aggressively pricing their products? Or would they give themselves a bonus, their stockholders dividends, and rest on their laurels while taking in the cash for a product that has become essential to the global economy and really the future of humanity?

Or were you speaking of AMD being the good that is working hard, taking big risks, and laying golden eggs because it is fighting an uphill battle?

If so, consider that risks are risks because they don't always work out. Sometimes they fail. And while that works if you are an angel investor risking a few tens of thousands on dozens of start-ups, where any one success can make up for the loss of all the others, it is not as smart when you have a single company you're risking and success means you just get to keep playing a little longer. And having a handful of processor companies takes more than a few tens of thousands each.

> US+EU to fund AMD

IANAL, but I don't think this would be legal under WTO rules. It would be seen as an unfair advantage to AMD, and Intel could complain to the WTO about it.

Something similar happened recently when Brazil accused the Province of Quebec of funding Bomardier (who competes with Embraer). [0]

[0] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-canada-wto-idUSKBN1...

If that's a violation of WTO rules it seems like these rules would need to get overhauled.

WTO rules are very biased in general, allowing for some kinds of protectionism, which are more popular in the US, and banning other kinds entirely.

It’s complete bullshit, as who they are applied to is entirely subjective.

As already said, funding a company is not fair competition. If governments (us, eu, etc) cared for competition in this market (or any other tbh) they could have simply enforced the fair market regulations. Instead they chose to ignore the unfair practices of Intel during the opteron days. In a similar way, if they cared about fair competition and protecting consumers they would n't have let microsoft enforce their windows tax on everybody.

Apparently they do not care.

Some years ago I read a moderately well fleshed out proposal to create a European semiconductor consortium as a sort of an Airbus for CPUs. My recollection is that, while it was somewhat flawed, it was an idea with significant merit.

They should do the same for software companies that produce software for the governments, with the requirement to open source the software.

This is coming from an area where Microsoft has a vicegrip on all government software to the tune of 99% of the market, and then runs smear campaigns and tries to bribe politicians in that last 1% to adopt them.

Most politicians are technologically illiterate and when the people they know are those with the most money to get closest its going to be big corporate interests that get their ear.

Absolutely yes.

These large open source code bases represent huge value stores for modern civil societies. We're all better off because they exist and we'd do well to promote them.

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