Some clarifying stuff about the Nvidia hack and the Linux leak
With less and less to analyze, I feel like my primary job is to be "institutional memory" about some of these things. The hack was 2 years ago (almost to the day!), and many folks have joined since then, and the people who saw some of the leaked files at that time have moved on from being thread regulars, so I'll just bring some of those very old discoveries forward.
Nvidia Hack
Nvidia got hacked with a ransomware attack, and the attackers dropped some of the found data onto the internet to get Nvidia to move. Some of that data was apparently stuff like "employee addresses and social security numbers." The majority of it was not Nintendo related. What we know about the hacked data mostly comes from Nintendo-centric grey-hatters who have sifted through, but except for a few screenshots and tiny excerpts, the actual data is out on the darkweb somewhere.
The Linux "leak"
Nvidia also published drivers for Drake in their Linux distribution. Those drivers were clearly in-progress before they were moved out of the public source code repository. But almost everything that came out of the hack was later confirmed by the Linux driver, and a lot more interesting data besides. The only thing that there wasn't a scrap of info about in the Linux driver was the size of the GPU. That remains basically the only thing we need to trust people who saw the NVN2 code to know about.
The GPU Size
I don't know what all was contained in the hack, but what mostly gets talked about is essentially the GPU driver/core API for Switch 2. This isn't a chip design document or spec sheet. It does list some properties of the chip, but that's not what's relevant here. What's relevant is that the code is designed to run on
any Nvidia graphics card so that developers can use their workstations without needing a hardware devkit. But while running on those cards, it ignores the cards
actual hardware and behaves
as if the system has 12 SMs.
Rich at Digital Foundry called that "our smoking gun" when it came to GPU size, and I think that's about right. Whatever size we get, that was the target
for the final chip.
File Age
First mention about NVN2 was from 2019 some people said, so there is no way AMD work on something for Nintendo when Nvidia aleardy start work
2019?? That's way too early.
Not sure about accuracy of 2019 mention itself, but APIs can exist before hardware does and NVN2 might have been tested against existing nvidia hardware that has DLSS capability in 2019, before T239 was taped out, etc.
NVN was forked for NVN2. They are substantially similar. Some of the files apparently have 2019 dates on them, not because it represents the
start of NVN2 development, but the last time those files changed in the original NVN.
The version of DLSS integrated into NVN2 had a build date (if I'm remembering correctly, searching the thread is tough) of February 2022, days before the data was exfiltrated from Nvidia. So we know the code was up-to-date at the time of the leak
Chip Tape Out
The chip tape out timeline has nothing to do with the hacked data, and is instead something I found while diving into the Linux code. There is a bugfix about PCI timing in the Linux driver from "SSG" - that's Nvidia's Silicon Solutions Group. That sorta bug seems like the sort of thing that comes up when you are off simulator. Subsequent fixes also seemed "real hardware" related. I guessed at a tape-out in August of 2022 based on those commits.
That timing has since seemingly be confirmed by customs data, with the first chips shipped in August IIRC.
With the Linux drivers being updated all the way to tape-out, with tape-out happening only 6 months after the hack, and with the hack and the linux drivers agreeing on all points it seems highly likely that the few things in the hack that weren't in the Linux drivers - the GPU size - was still accurate at time of tape out.
" when we knew YEARS ago that nintendo had already settled with NVIDIA for switch 2, that's the moment he completely lost any credibility (that he didn't have to begin with).