Hacker News Reader

Comment by randomsilence | Hacker News Reader

It's the 'secret Coca Cola recipe' leaked to Pepsi situation: The source code is still protected by copy rights and patents. AMD cannot just take it.

View on HN

Of course, but having it is better than not having it - not just for their competitors, but their users. We could find any fishy things they might be doing in there, make the public aware and pressure them to stop. With a better understanding of the driver internals, we (well, not me, but smart people) could create patches to fix common issues, enable features that were locked away...

There are countries that don't care about US IP laws. China comes to mind.

And, with the current crisis in mind, Russia. They'll be looking to expanding their local semiconductor production from now on.

Having chip designs without a state of the art fab won't help them any more than having software without a computer would.

For China and Russia to replace TSMC they'd need TSMC's (and ASML's) secrets, as well as nVidia's.

That's if we're assuming they want to directly reproduce existing hardware - I imagine they'd actually leverage it as something their engineers can learn from for future advancement

I can tell you Russia is so far behind in technology they won't be able to do anything with this knowledge.

AMD cannot just take or copy it. But they can indirectly take advantage of techniques that will be leaked.

For example, we know that NVIDIA's SM are split into slice which allows to easily adjust the size of a SM without rewriting the whole code, but we don't know many details about it and in particular we don't know how exactly the interconnect between register banks and operands collectors is built within a slice and between slices.

This does not seem to be patented, and this is only one very specific example

Reply on news.ycombinator.com