The Lapsus$ group has been in the news recently for theft of source code form some high-profile targets. These targets have included companies like NVIDIA, Samsung, Vodafone, and Ubisoft. The NVIDIA event was noteworthy as it included a claim that NVIDIA hacked the attackers back in order to encrypt the data that have been taken out of their environment.

Earlier today we reported that the same group that hit NVIDIA and stole source code along with employee logins also hit Samsung and stole around 190GB of source code data related to how galaxy mobile devices operate. The data, according to the Lapsus$ group, covers the bootloader for the trust zone and trusted apps, how galaxy devices encrypt data and other code operating fundamentals.

The Lapsus$ group, the same ones that broke into NVIDIA and Stole corporate data and had their attack VM encrypted, appear to have also broken into Samsung. Lapsus$ has leaked what they claim to be source code for several sensitive applications include apps that run in the Trust Zone on Samsung Mobile Devices.

In September 2020 Nvidia announced that it was in talks to acquire ARM Holdings from SoftBank Group Corp. The deal was not surprising, but it did send waves through the industry. The concerns around this deal were and are the same as the ones currently surrounding the Microsoft-Activision deal. Given the level of competition in the industry, would Nvidia use its new purchase to create roadblocks for their competition? Nvidia has always maintained that they would never do anything like this, but their assurances were never enough to get past regulators.

Over the last couple of days, we have received information that would indicate nVidia is not moving to HBM 2 for their consumer GPUs (outside of some extremely high-end models). Instead, they appear to be focusing on improvements found in GDDR5X and GDDR6. Conversely, AMD appears to be focusing on HBM for many of their high-end and even some mid-range cards. The two very different paths has sparked something of a debate amongst fans of both products (as you can imagine). The questions are, why chose one over the other at this point and is HBM a truly viable option for AMD?

The experts have all weighed in. 2016 will be the year of Virtual Reality. The problem is that the experts are very often wrong. Still that has not stopped multiple companies from pushing out new VR headsets, APIs, development kits and more. The craze has gone so far as to start effecting the way that companies are making core hardware. We already know that AMD is pushing for VR mastery with new products and by showing which existing products also have a level of VR support.

It is said that nature abhors a vacuum and that is certainly true. Something will come along to fill the void if we let nature take its course. Unfortunately this law is a little mutated in the consumer electronics market and especially in the PC component world. Here is reads; the market cannot stand not having an “It” technology, so we much create one. It seems that the last few years we have been watching this happen.

On the 19th of January Samsung announced that they had begun mass production of their 4GB HBM 2.0 3D memory. This announcement was the starting gun for the next big GPU race. As we know both AMD and NVIDIA are racing to get viable products to the market in time for Oculus and HTC to launch their consumer version VR headsets. Up until now we have really only seen the developers’ kits and while these have been impressive they are not what most are hoping for in the final product.

Yesterday we talked about the possibility that AMD will launch a Dual-GPU R9 Fury X card geared for 4k and VR. This is certainly welcome news for most AMD fans and for fans of virtual reality. It was no coincidence that the first time we are seeing this in operation was at a big VR event in LA or that the launch is rumored to coincide with the launch of Oculus and HTC’s Vive headsets. This move would be a very high-end AMD card on the market around April/May of this year.

Remember that little patent squabble that NVIDIA and Samsung got into last year? Well some things have happened and they are not all that good for NVIDIA. If you have already forgotten about this incident (we do not blame you) we will fill you in. NVIDIA decided to file a complaint with the ITC against Samsung and Qualcomm. The claim was that Samsung was using technology that violated patents that they owned (programmable shaders, parallel processing etc.). NVIDIA also filed a patent law suit at the same time.