A few days ago AMD announced that it had suffered a graphic theft. The company spoke generically of the subtraction of "test files" related to a subset of current and future graphic products. In the early hours we immediately talked about the projects of two Navi GPUs (Navi 10 and the future Navi 21), as well as Arden, the graphic part of the SoC of the Xbox Series X.
Although the only way to understand what has been stolen is to get your hands on those files, several foreign sites (Wccftech, Extremetech) have had the opportunity to talk to people who say those files have seen them and can say , with relative certainty, that it is not any "source code" as it was originally leaked.
This would therefore confirm AMD's words that stolen graphic intellectual property is not critical to the competitiveness or security of graphic products. So what's in those files that, according to whoever got them, would be worth a ransom of $ 100 million? It would be Partial "Verilog" files, usually used in the construction of processors.
Those files they would represent "single and isolated" GPU functions, not the entire architectural design o aspects so important as to jeopardize, if the files end up in the hands of a competitor, the chances of competitiveness of future Radeon GPUs. Even files not yet published online would always be of relative importance and far from being able to define themselves as "source code". By the way, the files would have been written with a proprietary scheme compatible only with an internal AMD design language, therefore basically unusable by third parties.
In short, it seems that the stolen information is only a very small fraction of what it would take to make a GPU. Furthermore, with those data, it would not be possible to trace even the possible performance of the products involved. As far as security is concerned, what has been leaked should not (according to sources) jeopardize AMD's graphic architectures, although it cannot be completely excluded. However, the company is confident that it will not be in danger in this regard too.
In conclusion, unless the perpetrator has some "ace up the sleeve" still unknown (the published files would be only a first part of a larger package), AMD has nothing to fear. The only thing you need to worry about is figuring out how those files got to a third person, so as to strengthen the controls and measures to prevent this from happening in the future.
