Counter Espionage – Stories of Intel, AMD, and Nvidia fighting leakers (Telegrams for Die Shrink)

We've all heard about counter-intelligence techniques like giving slightly different information to different teams, as a way of identifying where a leak came from. Do your informants use counter-counter-intelligence? i.e. leaking another team's info rather than their own to make it look like someone else is the leaker?

I think companies "leak" information to create hype about upcoming products and to spur their competition to disrupt their release cycles..however this "pandemic" has disrupted everything..from top to bottom.. It's going to be an interesting couple of years..

I never really wrapped my head about the idea why would people just leak informations? Aren't the leaks hurting companies or is some amount of leaks actually good for marketing?

QuickJumper

I have two questions. Have any of your sources lost a job due to a leak that they gave you? Is evil NVidia (and I do think that they are evil) as tight lipped as many say or do they leak like everyone else?

Dr Forbin

I want to ask more about leaking in general in this industry, particularly: How do you think or perceive leaks and such are different now than they were 5, 10, maybe 20 years ago? Somewhat similar to you, I started learning more about PC hardware around the back end of the Thermi era, and for what it's worth, my recollection of that time doesn't really have any concept of leaks. Do you think leaks back then or even before then was a much shallower reach than they do now, back then only circulating in really "hardcore" forums? Or were there less leaks entirely? What do you think sparked the rise to public prominence of leaks? AdoredTV was probably the more prominent in the "rise" of the leak "era", but surely it was more shifts in the industry that triggered this, not some individuals that happened to dig into the right places to listen from...

qhfreddy

What do you think about the new leaked outer layer design of a zen 4 chip with strange cutouts comming from executable fix. Any speculations why can it be or not be real?

As a follow up to that question, do the companies ever pretend to try to root out the source of “sanctioned” leaks to try to make them seem more genuine.

Will leaks of know-hows (or some super secret methodology ) help the open hardware community to bring better open hardware or everything is under some kind of patent protection law?

Valko Milev

Of all of the anti-leak tactics that you know these companies use, what would you consider to be the most interesting or unusual ones?

Brink0fDestruction

Was the whole 5Ghz Zen 2 debacle a case of misleading info leaked on purpose or early engineering targets not being met on the platform?

Rootknight

You’ve mentioned multiple times about how you test your leakers before you begin to trust them enough, but what does it take a leaker to trust that *you* will honor the leaker ‘code of honor’?

Amiablechief

What's the funniest/dumbest fake leak you've had the pleasure of seeing? How far does Nvidia take its efforts to crack down on leaks? They've always seemed to be the most opaque of the big 3 CPU/GPU companies, so I've always imagined that they're willing to go to absurd lengths to squash any internal leaks.

Cleansweep

Regarding your relationship with leakers. Do you know the face/real name of any of them, or are they all faceless usernames like Goatlicker_69? Furthermore, were there any aspects between the leeker/techtuber relationship that you found surprising?

Kyle Harder

How much of your information do you suspect are compamy sanctioned "leaks" that are meant to drive ongoing interest in a product or test the public's reaction to an idea without risking the exposure of an official announcement? If so, do your sources ever give you a heads up when this is the type of information they are passing along to you?

Rogue Scholar

Have any of these companies ever worked a fake leak into the public to distract from a genuine one? What were some good ones?

Uwhm

do you think intel adopting FSR will guarantee adoption in the market?

I've always been interested in how the leak about GTX changing to RTX came about. Geforce GTX was a pretty strong brand. It seemed a little risky to me, to change it at the time.

MarvoloRiddle

How's Arcturus coming? ;)

Eleriam

Raja himself is your Intel source. Right? Riiiiight? :^)

Xerox PARC

If I recall correctly one time you teased that someone you get info from is pretty high up in AMD. One time you made a cheeky comment in discord when he was on screen during a press event before promptly deleing your comment. I won't say who, but am I remembering things correctly? Do these tech companies use leakers as ninja marketing? Also, unrelated but I start at AMD as a thermal engineering intern next week (Zen 4 is hot, in more ways than one ; ) ). I want to thank you Tom, as I feel your content pushed me to research the more technical aspects of hardware leading me to pursue it as a possible career.

Sam

I was wondering if you thought leaks are more frequent or more accurate today vs say, 5 years ago. I know this might be hard to answer because as your contacts has gotten larger I'm sure so has your leak net but I'd like your perspective.

Jeremy Dalton