AMD: someone stole our graphics IP, demands $100 million in ransom

AMD has announced that a hacker has stolen some of its graphics IP, and is demanding that the company pay them $100 million for its return.

Back in December 2019, the company says it was contacted by someone who said they had access to "test files" for AMD's current, and future graphics products. A handful of these GPU "test files" were then uploaded to the graphics forum GitHub, but AMD quickly reacted and slapped it with a DCMA takedown notice.

No, the AMD GPU IP leak cannot be used as a source code to build, and deisgn some custom RDNA graphics solution -- don't go expecting that at all. It can't be used to build products, it can't be used to reverse engineer a Radeon GPU design, or anything close to that.

But the simple fact is someone has enough weight to demand $100 million in ransom from AMD, in what appears to be the Arden GPU that is going to power the monster next-gen Xbox Series X console. As for the Radeon GPU IP stolen, the hacker said they found the source code on an "unprotected computer/server" and then accessed it by using "some exploits".

Wccftech has broken it down, stating that the Verilog files in question are "typically used in the construction of processors", and that the files "represent a single and isolated function(s) on the GPU - NOT the whole/actual GPU blueprint. This I believe is the most important takeaway and context for the IP theft. This particular function(s) is not very exciting and not part of AMD's core IP".

The hacker has said that if no one coughs up the $100,000,000 then they will "just leak everything".

AMD has talked about the GPU IP theft in a statement.

AMD Explains:

At AMD, data security and the protection of our intellectual property are a priority. In December 2019, we were contacted by someone who claimed to have test files related to a subset of our current and future graphics products, some of which were recently posted online, but have since been taken down.

While we are aware the perpetrator has additional files that have not been made public, we believe the stolen graphics IP is not core to the competitiveness or security of our graphics products. We are not aware of the perpetrator possessing any other AMD IP.

We are working closely with law enforcement officials and other experts as a part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

AMD RDNA 2 / Navi 2X / Big Navi Specs

• Optimized 7nm+ node (kinda confirmed)
• RDNA 2 architecture (confirmed)
• 80 compute units
• 5120 stream processors
• 17.5 TFLOPs compute performance
• Hardware ray tracing support (confirmed)

NVIDIA is currently cooking its next-gen Ampere GPU architecture, something that will power the GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3070 that were recently teased. These cards have a huge 10/20GB of GDDR6 on the higher-end SKUs, while rumor has it the lower-end cards will have 8/16GB GDDR6.

Check out these monster specs:

GA103 (GeForce RTX 3080)

• 10/20GB GDDR6
• 320-bit memory interface
• 60 SMs
• 3480 CUDA cores

GA104 (GeForce RTX 3070)

• 8/16GB GDDR6
• 256-bit memory interface
• 48 SMs
• 3072 CUDA cores