First steps towards a made-in-Europe high-performance microprocessor | Hacker News Reader

First steps towards a made-in-Europe high-performance microprocessor

european-processor-initiative.eu

13 pointslelf9 comments

Slightly misleading title. The microprocessor wouldn't be made-in-Europe, only designed in Europe and turned into silicon somewhere else. AFAIK there are no fabs in Europe that could manufacture this chip.

There are the 70nm Global Foundries fabs in Dresden (ex-AMD), Bosch is planning their fab there also. Good enough for R&D, the real CPU's will be fabricated in Taiwan or China then, I assume.

If I was more optimist, I'd say that this would be a good opportunity to open up silicon design by requiring some amount of transparency that is usually expected of publicly funded research.

However I'm guessing that this initiative has probably close to no leverage on the EDA vendors & the fabs, so at best we'd get the RTL source.

TBH I'd be happy with a fully open 130nm design kit that is actually supported by a fab.

A trivial website which needs 10s to go from blank to content. I fear the CPU will have the same fate. Unusable.

I thought ARM was made in Europe? Maybe England doesn't count as Europe proper? Or because it now belongs to an Asian company?

The EU is turning full SSSR, now with custom microprocessors. This effort will be inherently ineffective and produce worse results than what the market could offer. Tax payers' money should not be spent on projects like this.

"ensure that the key competences for high-end chip design remain in Europe"

This is the money quote. Australia messed this up so badly when they stopped supporting local car manufacturing. The point isn't the jobs, the point is keeping hard earned competencies.

The same could be argued to ensure that absolutely any key competency remains in Europe - nuclear reactor design, pharmaceutics design, car design, aircraft design, trains design, or whatever; but none of it should justify the creation of EU projects in any of these fields.

Nonsense. This is research/innovation funding on a strategic issue. It's not the EU producing something, it's the EU putting incentives to encourage local innovation and development work. The same is done by US, China, ...

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