The West's deeper problem is with history it's not they fail to learn its lessons, but they learnt the wrong ones and continue repeating it, militarily and economically. Their perception based on entitlement, global command and control will implode
nice write-up. There is one thing you missed though, and that's Russia's actual domestic chip capability. It's way beyond 65nm. They were already making 30nm in 2011 (prototype stage). Martyanov had a post about it a little while back:
What's important to note is a huge difference between Russia and the west in WHO is doing the cutting edge research and production of these chips. In the west it is commercial enterprises who are responsible for it, and for their own commercial benefit, widely proclaim their accomplishments. In Russia though, it is being done by organisations who (directly or indirectly) report to the government and who keep their (high end) capabilities a secret. Understandable, as the primary beneficiary are defence related projects. So we don't actually know what Russia can produce on its own when it comes to chips, but given all those extremely high-tech military developments come out of Russia, I doubt they are lagging far behind, if at all.
thanks, see that's why I wanted your expertise here, to add important corrections and contextualizations.
I was keeping my post relatively 'surface level' and vague-ish so as not to make it too log and bog down in details, but rather just give a broad overview to catch some people up, but you're right, if one actually delves much deeper into this specific topic of CPU's, there are MANY nuances that get overlooked in regard to Russia's semiconductor capabilities. For instance there's this: https://www.techradar.com/news/this-russian-cpu-annihilates-amds-epyc-on-one-vital-feature which highlights how Russia's Elbrus CPU actually has some critical features that "annihilate" (their words, not mine) Western CPU's and can be particularly superior for certain government/military applications in line with this (from another article): "Still, at least this will be possible if someone in a Russian government agency needs to run an application with a huge dataset on a CPU designed in Moscow. "
And there's other Russian sites you can find that have done benchmarks where the new Elbrus destroys some of the top i7 chips in certain rendering capabilities, etc.
Well, I'm not an expert on technological matters, it's more question of connecting dots from various different fields.
Here's some further food for thought on the matter of chip and semiconductor production. Like for nearly all technology related matters, we have been brought up to believe that the West is far ahead of the rest of the world. And that it will stay that way. Our lead may narrow with regard to some (like China), but deep down we have this conviction that 'we' (the west) will stay well ahead. In tandem with that belief comes another one, namely that our pace of innovation and technological advancements isn't just higher than those of others, but is pretty much as fast as it can be, because we consider our societies as a whole to be vastly superior (even those critical of some parts of the west typically still have some ingrained sense of moral superiority) to others.
The opposite is true. Our societal model has come to stifle and hold back innovation and technological advancement. Our pace is far from the highest one that is realistically feasible, and others may well have been outpacing us for years.
So what is holding us back? We still cling to the illusion that the western economical model is a free market one. It isn't. Not by a long shot. Not where it matters anyway. Our markets are very highly regulated, by authorities and governmental institutions on all sorts of levels, including supra-national ones.
Those regulations primarily serve to protect existing market players (i.e. corporations) by raising the threshold for newcomers to the point that entering the market as a new player becomes extremely challenging, and unlikely to be profitable. The larger the existing corporation is, the more it is likely to benefit from these kinds of protections, if anything just from the mere fact that it has deeper pockets to buy that protection with, as governments anywhere tend to fill up with the corrupt or easily corruptible.
This leads to markets being dominated by (near) monopolists or cartels. What both of these have in common is that they have little or no commercial incentive for high-end technological innovation. The reason is that they would be their own main competitor. Such innovations would drive down the price of the previous generation, the one they are selling at high prices and making a killing on. Why would they deliberately kill that cash-cow (and having to spend huge amounts of money doing so)? They don't. Without a competitor to force them to (thanks to the highly regulated markets) they postpone these innovations as long as they can, so that they can milk the old cow for as much as they can get out of her.
One such market is that for chips and semiconductors. Thanks to the monopoly of ASML, there is no real competition. The entry costs for new players is so high, that it is commercial suicide to try and compete with ASML. You will often hear claims that it is 'impossible' for China or anyone else to attain that level. Those who claim that have a point, but only with regards to the commercial aspect. It is commercially 'impossible' for others to catch up. And with those others, they implicitly mean other corporations (Chinese ones for example), who have to operate under the market conditions dominated by western megacorporations and set by western-controlled supranational institutions.
But what if they don't care about the commercial aspect, and making a profit? What if instead of a commercial corporation, a government is willing to put up the money, brains and means to reach that level, no matter the cost? Remember, our western high-end technological innovation is outsourced to monopolistic corporations who benefit from a glacial pace of change, not a fast one. Our western pace of technological innovation has become very, very slow.
If Russia's own chip-making program indeed went dark after 2011, when they already were working on 30nm chips, and continued on the pace that scientific achievements allowed (as opposed to our commercial-interests based one), and with sufficient funding, they could easily have surpassed us by now. Don't forget they had two big advantages in catching up. First, they knew the technology was feasible, as others had already proven, and the broad outlines of how to achieve it were known, so that saved them a lot of effort. As for the 'secret' specifics on how to further scale down chip-sizes, that's were Russia's excellent intelligence services come in. The knowledge was already out there. Al they had to do was go and get it, whether the owner was willing to part with it or not.
ASML is a Dutch company, and guess what, over the last decade or so, there have been several instances of Russian diplomats having been expelled from the Netherlands as 'spies', far more than for most other European countries, including much bigger ones. And as far as I can tell, the one object in the country with the highest strategic value for Russia to spy on is ASML. And I bet that their security was not up to keeping the Russians out. Far from it.
So yes, I believe that the Russians could have pretty much duplicated what ASML does. Maybe not the very latest generation yet. Then again, maybe they have. And maybe they're already ahead. And not telling us. Wouldn't surprise me one bit.
yep..and the ironic thing vis a vis this very topic of microchips is that Intel's famed Pentium is said to be named after Intel's chief chip architect/designer in the 90's, Russian immigrant Vladimir Pentkovski who as I understand it designed the Pentium chips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Pentkovski
The only problem is China is currently waging a chip war with the west. Yes, it supplies to russia but for how long? I wouldn't be surprised if china begins to dial back how much they give considering their own needs and dwindling supplies. The same goes for turkey.
Russiaa only hope is to accelerate it'd own homegrown manufacturing and research program to make smaller chips and even if they can they still need certain technologies to be able to even etch such small transistors on a circuit board. It's a tough road ahead
I have recently noted a trend to call Western elites to be sociopaths, or psychopaths...etc. I really think that this ‘psychologising’ of “a select technocratic cabal”, which is a much better descriptor, covers over the neoliberal take over of the Western world. This is not a comment on the article, of course. This is a general comment on psychologising everything, reducing individuals to their psychological traits, while missing the most egregious outcome of neoliberal financialisation of everything human, leading to a destruction of society. Thank you for your analysis of Russian economy. Suddenly, it seems to me, there is a hope to change what neoliberalism unleashed on
Western societies. But could we regain our humanist tradition?
A lot of hard work and it shows .Well done
thanks man, always appreciated your support
Great article.
I have barely started reading and I already see information here that is new to me.
You are the first person I have bothered subscribing to on SubStack.
I am glad I took a look.
Many thanks.
thanks buddy, appreciate it
The West's deeper problem is with history it's not they fail to learn its lessons, but they learnt the wrong ones and continue repeating it, militarily and economically. Their perception based on entitlement, global command and control will implode
yep..mostly because they don't serve the interests of their people but interests of a select technocratic cabal
Hi,
nice write-up. There is one thing you missed though, and that's Russia's actual domestic chip capability. It's way beyond 65nm. They were already making 30nm in 2011 (prototype stage). Martyanov had a post about it a little while back:
https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2023/01/and-now-something-off-left-field.html
What's important to note is a huge difference between Russia and the west in WHO is doing the cutting edge research and production of these chips. In the west it is commercial enterprises who are responsible for it, and for their own commercial benefit, widely proclaim their accomplishments. In Russia though, it is being done by organisations who (directly or indirectly) report to the government and who keep their (high end) capabilities a secret. Understandable, as the primary beneficiary are defence related projects. So we don't actually know what Russia can produce on its own when it comes to chips, but given all those extremely high-tech military developments come out of Russia, I doubt they are lagging far behind, if at all.
thanks, see that's why I wanted your expertise here, to add important corrections and contextualizations.
I was keeping my post relatively 'surface level' and vague-ish so as not to make it too log and bog down in details, but rather just give a broad overview to catch some people up, but you're right, if one actually delves much deeper into this specific topic of CPU's, there are MANY nuances that get overlooked in regard to Russia's semiconductor capabilities. For instance there's this: https://www.techradar.com/news/this-russian-cpu-annihilates-amds-epyc-on-one-vital-feature which highlights how Russia's Elbrus CPU actually has some critical features that "annihilate" (their words, not mine) Western CPU's and can be particularly superior for certain government/military applications in line with this (from another article): "Still, at least this will be possible if someone in a Russian government agency needs to run an application with a huge dataset on a CPU designed in Moscow. "
Here's another good/detailed writeup: https://www.stalkerzone.org/domestic-16-core-processor-elbrus-16s-has-russia-really-caught-up/
And there's other Russian sites you can find that have done benchmarks where the new Elbrus destroys some of the top i7 chips in certain rendering capabilities, etc.
Well, I'm not an expert on technological matters, it's more question of connecting dots from various different fields.
Here's some further food for thought on the matter of chip and semiconductor production. Like for nearly all technology related matters, we have been brought up to believe that the West is far ahead of the rest of the world. And that it will stay that way. Our lead may narrow with regard to some (like China), but deep down we have this conviction that 'we' (the west) will stay well ahead. In tandem with that belief comes another one, namely that our pace of innovation and technological advancements isn't just higher than those of others, but is pretty much as fast as it can be, because we consider our societies as a whole to be vastly superior (even those critical of some parts of the west typically still have some ingrained sense of moral superiority) to others.
The opposite is true. Our societal model has come to stifle and hold back innovation and technological advancement. Our pace is far from the highest one that is realistically feasible, and others may well have been outpacing us for years.
So what is holding us back? We still cling to the illusion that the western economical model is a free market one. It isn't. Not by a long shot. Not where it matters anyway. Our markets are very highly regulated, by authorities and governmental institutions on all sorts of levels, including supra-national ones.
Those regulations primarily serve to protect existing market players (i.e. corporations) by raising the threshold for newcomers to the point that entering the market as a new player becomes extremely challenging, and unlikely to be profitable. The larger the existing corporation is, the more it is likely to benefit from these kinds of protections, if anything just from the mere fact that it has deeper pockets to buy that protection with, as governments anywhere tend to fill up with the corrupt or easily corruptible.
This leads to markets being dominated by (near) monopolists or cartels. What both of these have in common is that they have little or no commercial incentive for high-end technological innovation. The reason is that they would be their own main competitor. Such innovations would drive down the price of the previous generation, the one they are selling at high prices and making a killing on. Why would they deliberately kill that cash-cow (and having to spend huge amounts of money doing so)? They don't. Without a competitor to force them to (thanks to the highly regulated markets) they postpone these innovations as long as they can, so that they can milk the old cow for as much as they can get out of her.
One such market is that for chips and semiconductors. Thanks to the monopoly of ASML, there is no real competition. The entry costs for new players is so high, that it is commercial suicide to try and compete with ASML. You will often hear claims that it is 'impossible' for China or anyone else to attain that level. Those who claim that have a point, but only with regards to the commercial aspect. It is commercially 'impossible' for others to catch up. And with those others, they implicitly mean other corporations (Chinese ones for example), who have to operate under the market conditions dominated by western megacorporations and set by western-controlled supranational institutions.
But what if they don't care about the commercial aspect, and making a profit? What if instead of a commercial corporation, a government is willing to put up the money, brains and means to reach that level, no matter the cost? Remember, our western high-end technological innovation is outsourced to monopolistic corporations who benefit from a glacial pace of change, not a fast one. Our western pace of technological innovation has become very, very slow.
If Russia's own chip-making program indeed went dark after 2011, when they already were working on 30nm chips, and continued on the pace that scientific achievements allowed (as opposed to our commercial-interests based one), and with sufficient funding, they could easily have surpassed us by now. Don't forget they had two big advantages in catching up. First, they knew the technology was feasible, as others had already proven, and the broad outlines of how to achieve it were known, so that saved them a lot of effort. As for the 'secret' specifics on how to further scale down chip-sizes, that's were Russia's excellent intelligence services come in. The knowledge was already out there. Al they had to do was go and get it, whether the owner was willing to part with it or not.
ASML is a Dutch company, and guess what, over the last decade or so, there have been several instances of Russian diplomats having been expelled from the Netherlands as 'spies', far more than for most other European countries, including much bigger ones. And as far as I can tell, the one object in the country with the highest strategic value for Russia to spy on is ASML. And I bet that their security was not up to keeping the Russians out. Far from it.
So yes, I believe that the Russians could have pretty much duplicated what ASML does. Maybe not the very latest generation yet. Then again, maybe they have. And maybe they're already ahead. And not telling us. Wouldn't surprise me one bit.
yep..and the ironic thing vis a vis this very topic of microchips is that Intel's famed Pentium is said to be named after Intel's chief chip architect/designer in the 90's, Russian immigrant Vladimir Pentkovski who as I understand it designed the Pentium chips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Pentkovski
Did you write for the saker in early SMO reports since most vids were refer to your bitcut channel?
The only problem is China is currently waging a chip war with the west. Yes, it supplies to russia but for how long? I wouldn't be surprised if china begins to dial back how much they give considering their own needs and dwindling supplies. The same goes for turkey.
Russiaa only hope is to accelerate it'd own homegrown manufacturing and research program to make smaller chips and even if they can they still need certain technologies to be able to even etch such small transistors on a circuit board. It's a tough road ahead
I have recently noted a trend to call Western elites to be sociopaths, or psychopaths...etc. I really think that this ‘psychologising’ of “a select technocratic cabal”, which is a much better descriptor, covers over the neoliberal take over of the Western world. This is not a comment on the article, of course. This is a general comment on psychologising everything, reducing individuals to their psychological traits, while missing the most egregious outcome of neoliberal financialisation of everything human, leading to a destruction of society. Thank you for your analysis of Russian economy. Suddenly, it seems to me, there is a hope to change what neoliberalism unleashed on
Western societies. But could we regain our humanist tradition?