The “alleged” data theft suffered by NVIDIA following the attack by the South American group Lapsus $ becomes less “presumed” and more and more concrete with the dissemination of some information – apparently extrapolated from a package of files distributed by hackers via Torrent files via Telegram – which would seem reveal part of the company’s future plans. The information below was sent to the Videocardz website (to which we refer you for the screenshots) from some readers who have downloaded and analyzed the files.
In one of the stolen files it would be mentioned (with the string GLOBAL_ARCH_BLACKWELL) a new architecture call Blackwell. The name in question, as per NVIDIA tradition, refers to a scholar, in this specific case the American mathematician and statistician David Harold Blackwell (1919 – 2010). “His scientific contributions concern game theory, measurement theory, probability and statistics”, we read in Wikipedia page dedicated to him.
Blackwell should turn to the world of data centers and succeed the Hopper architecturethat NVIDIA should introduce this year, so it could hypothetically arrive in about 2-3 years if the company keeps the cadence of the latest releases.
interesting to highlight as the leaker Kopite7Kimi pubblic un tweet in July 2021 in which he explicitly mentioned Blackwell with a lot of photos, speculating it was the real code name of the “Ampere Next Next” project indicated in the latest official roadmap released by NVIDIA.
NVIDIA, anti-mining measures (and not only) in the hands of hackers? It seems to be
In the files published by the South American hackers there would be references to due GPU Blackwell, GB100 e GB102but also to the GPUs that should make up the range of GPUs GeForce RTX 4000 “Ada” Lovelace. In particular, in the alleged code the code names are read AD102, AD103, AD104, AD106, AD107 e AD10B. As for the Hopper architecture for the datacenter world, NVIDIA would be developing two chips called GH100 e GH202. The purpose of the second chip is not clear at the moment, some speculate that it is somehow related to the gaming sector, but there are no confirmations.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA’s silence on the matter continues: after confirming a “cyber incident”, without specifying whether or not there has been a data theft, the company has entrenched itself behind total silence (not before attacking the hackers in turn, failing). Even our attempts to get more details have failed: no formal declaration, no response to our request for clarification, which suggests an NVIDIA still committed to ascertaining the extent of the damage and establishing possible reactions.
UPDATE 09:45 01-03-2022: here the official response from NVIDIA to the attack.