It’s tiring hearing this as if the US is any better on chip independence. Until VERY recently, both the US and Europe were limited to around 12nm domestically. Europe still has that capability, along with strong chip design companies, especially in automotive and industrial sectors. And nearly all modern US CPUs in mobile and embedded markets license Arm designs — a European (British) architecture.
Here is the relevant context I was referring to:
> […] the fact that it is not using a custom CPU and XPU created by European companies, as was originally hoped, and is basically an Nvidia machine top to middle […] speaks volumes about difficult it is to start from scratch to achieve chip independence for Europe
The article isn’t arguing semantics, and your point regarding ARM and 12nm is valid. However, the bottom line of that specific sentence you partially quoted is that they were hoping to use a custom CPU+XPU created by European companies, but ended up going with NVidia (an American company) instead.
Here, i will isolate the specific piece:
> start from scratch
Europe isn’t “starting from scratch.” It already has 12nm-class fabs (just like the US did until very recently), designs its own chips, and developed the very architecture — ARM — that many other countries now use as the foundation for their processors.
Sure, but the way you put it makes the final outcome look even worse for Europe.
As you said, Europe already has 12nm-class fabs, designs its own chips, and yet they still went with NVidia.
If it was a choice between truly starting from scratch vs. going with NVidia, the decision to go with NVidia would’ve been more understandable. But given the context that they aren’t truly starting from scratch, their decision to go with NVidia just seems even more embarrassing.
They didn’t “go with nvidia”. Your ignorance is exactly why such a statement by the author is detrimental to the work done. The uninformed end up spreading misinformation.
The raw compute (the "booster") is only one part of the system. The rest - the cluster modules - are European-designed, including not just the SiPearl Rhea CPU (SiPearl, France), but also the system architecture and software stack (Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Germany), the interconnect (ParTec, Germany), and the cooling systems (Atos/Eviden, France). These cluster modules are integrated into the BullSequana XH3000 platform (Atos/Eviden, France). Fabrication is outsourced to TSMC (Taiwan), but the design remains fully European.
The fact is that the mission statement is to remain globally competitive in terms of computing power, and that means getting exascale as soon as possible. They aren’t going to wait for homegrown compute chips even if they were months away (which i doubt they will be).
By your logic all American supercomputers “went with Inria (France)”, because America is “starting from scratch” at writing software.. that they have software developers and chose to use European software is embarrassing.. see how stupid and ignorant such a statement is?
The author has outright fabricated this whole idea of chip sovereignty being a part of Jupiter. I have no idea where he (and therefore you) got this idea from, but its simply not true - and further points to him just making some excuse to euro-bash. It seems to be a sign of the times under the mad king’s reign. When facts don’t support the narrative, they get reshaped to suit the mood. This kind of editorialising, where political sentiment is passed off as technical insight, doesn’t just weaken the argument, it undermines trust in serious discourse.
FYI, the selection criteria only allocated 100 points of a total of 1100 (of which a minimum of 50 were required) to "Contribution to the objectives of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking" (https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/about/discover-eurohpc-ju_en#mi...). i.e. Sovereignty was not a key objective. This is all public knowledge that you can easily find for yourself.
EDIT - link to the procurement doc: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/port...
theandrewbailey•6mo ago
I'll show myself out.
anher•6mo ago
SOLAR_FIELDS•6mo ago