A Hacker Stole and Leaked the Xbox Series X Graphics Source Code (engadget.com) 33
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: AMD has been having a particularly rough few months, apparently. The chip designer has revealed that a hacker stole test files for a "subset" of current and upcoming graphics hardware, some of which had been posted online before they were taken down. While AMD was shy on details, the claimed intruder told TorrentFreak that the material included source code for Navi 10 (think Radeon RX 5700 series), the future Navi 21 and the Arden GPU inside the Xbox Series X.
The self-proclaimed hacker added that she wanted $100 million for the source code and threatened to "leak everything" if there was no buyer. She reportedly found the GPU data in a "hacked computer" in November, although AMD said it hadn't been approached until December. AMD doesn't appear to be bowing under pressure. It believed the stolen code was "not core to the competitiveness or security" of its products, and said there was an "ongoing criminal investigation."
The self-proclaimed hacker added that she wanted $100 million for the source code and threatened to "leak everything" if there was no buyer. She reportedly found the GPU data in a "hacked computer" in November, although AMD said it hadn't been approached until December. AMD doesn't appear to be bowing under pressure. It believed the stolen code was "not core to the competitiveness or security" of its products, and said there was an "ongoing criminal investigation."
Could be good for open source graphics (Score:2, Interesting)
Yep, this was totally done in a cleanroom reversing fashion.
Whoâ(TM)s the target buyer? (Score:2)
When this idiot says âoeno buyerâ are they referring to AMD or a competitor? Anyone with just one more brain cell than this dumbass will just wait for the better deal: free.
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âoeno buyerâ
Come on slashdot, fix this already.
Re: Whoâ(TM)s the target buyer? (Score:2)
Oh look at mr fancy who can use quotes!
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Come on slashdot, fix this already!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2nd that
Re: Whoâ(TM)s the target buyer? (Score:1)
Exactly. Disabling smart punctuation shouldnâ(TM)t be the solution. Other websites work well.
â âoe â" âoe â ~.â(TM)
Re: Whoâ(TM)s the target buyer? (Score:2)
If they were trying to selling it then their position was ruined by also stating they would give it away for free.
Commercially I am sure amd is protected through patents.
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Commercially I am sure amd is protected through patents.
I doubt the market is Intel/nVidia, that would be suicidal. It'll be one of intelligence agencies through a shell company or one of the companies that sell exploits to them.
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It'll be one of intelligence agencies through a shell company or one of the companies that sell exploits to them.
The intelligence agencies will already have the code. If they're interested they;ll have someone on the inside - it's not like AMD are going to be able to stop them.
And, frankly, the only people the code is worth $100m to is AMD and they already have it.
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China would love to get a leg up on their own CPU/GPU production and they don't care about your patents or laws.
Another reason to by Nvidia (Score:1)
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Arguably that is why Nvidia has done so well in the AI market compared to ATI: everyone doing deep learning is doing it on Linux. If the drivers are bad, there's no reason to buy them.
Agree, though I would say it is also at least as important that NVidia created and promoted CUDA long before ATI tried anything of the sort.
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ATI was a big letter TRASH in the eye of open source community especially during that 2000-2010 their linux drivers where nowhere compared to nvidia. They still aren't. Not that I would advertise for Nvidia but since there is no other alternative Nvidia is the way to go!
Maybe I remember wrong, but from what I recall the open source nVidia drivers were absolutely TRASH in the 2000-2010 era and while the official ATi drivers were crap, their open source versions were somewhat respected. Now, if we're talking about the desktop Linux community and people who may want to game with ease or the like, than nVidia was the way to go, but the open source community seemed to be working with ATi better than nVidia to me.
The story doesn't add up (Score:2)
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Likelihood is close to 8.
AMD is moving towards FOSS drivers (Score:4, Insightful)
for a few years now, AMD has been moving more and more of the drivers (on both Windows and Linux) to FOSS, the performance delta between FOSS and closed drivers has been narrowing, and AMD has stated that their end goal is to transition to fully FOSS drivers.
So, unless this "hacker" stole the HDL (verilog and such) of the Silicon itself, the source code of the drivers was wound up to land (eventually) in the FOSS drivers.
Being that the XBoxX runs windows and Directx12X, there should be no significant difference between the Windows drivers and XBoxX drivers. OTOH Since sony is rumored to use a BSD derivative on their consoles, maybe leaking that source code may be bad.
Re: AMD is moving towards FOSS drivers (Score:1)
What about the XxxXboxxX 960 Extreme Exition though?
And its girl edition, the XoXboxoX 420 Hugs&Kisses?
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for a few years now, AMD has been moving more and more of the drivers (on both Windows and Linux) to FOSS, the performance delta between FOSS and closed drivers has been narrowing,
It's been interesting to follow this development. I had some OpenCL code that ran 60% faster with the FOSS drivers on the HD 7970 before I finally sold it. I've also had good experiences with OpenGL where the AMD drivers provided much better debugging info than Nvidia. OTOH, OpenCL 2.0 was not available for AMD FOSS drivers at the time, and there are other remaining issues.
So, unless this "hacker" stole the HDL (verilog and such) of the Silicon itself, the source code of the drivers was wound up to land (eventually) in the FOSS drivers.
AMD GPUs still need closed firmware blobs even when using the open drivers. The same holds for a lot of hardware, such as Intel GPUs
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there should be no significant difference between the Windows drivers and XBoxX drivers
That's like saying the that PC's run DirectX12 so there should be no difference between NVIDIA drivers and AMD drivers. What is relevant to the drivers is related to the silicon, not some API that sits above them, and the upcoming Xbox, like always is getting custom silicon.
No Hack (Score:1)
It was a CCP spy employee.
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It was a CCP spy employee.
Are the EVE Online developers planning to start making their own graphics hardware?
No he didn't steal it (Score:2)
He just made a copy, it's still there, I checked.
Not a hacker... (Score:2)
Lets be honest here, she did not "hack" anything to get the code. I believe if we are going to call her anything, it should be an opportunist.
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An opportunist that will be caught because she's clearly a dumdum.
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these systems are capable of doing much more with much less limitation than they are crippled to do.
AMD has posted pretty much all the documentation [amd.com] of what their GPUs can do on a registry level (scroll down to open GPU docs), which is equivalent to assembler for CPUs. There's extremely little stopping you from coding it to do whatever you want. Of course that won't give you DirectX or OpenGL or Vulkan support, but that's just software. Just like when you buy a CPU it doesn't come with all the software you could write for that CPU. And not of all that software is open source. But I guess it's never enough
SHE???? (Score:1)
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Er, the TF article quotes the alleged 'hacker' as self-identifying as 'she'. So maybe read stuff before commenting on it in the future, DUDE.