At my uni, 15 years ago, one postdoc reverse engineered NVIDIA chip and wrote more performant compiler. He did that by connecting oscyloscops to all chip's outputs and started with applying random current on inputs. Using ML and his genius he rediscoverd all opcodes including a few hidden ones. Eventually he got hired by some company that was doing a lot of GPU on supercomputers.
You can't do that by applying random inputs to any integrated GPU. I can see that perhaps it worked on some of the early multi-chip cards - where one chip was a texture sampler, and so on.
You'll have more luck reverse engineering the software driver first. They're not hidden, you can just open the driver files in Ghidra, the almost-universal tool for open-sourcing proprietary code. Hidden opcodes can be discovered first by just trying all the opcodes you couldn't discover any other way. You only need to go to the physical level if they're really hidden.
To be fair, Ghidra was released in 2019 and in general knowledge was still hard to find even back in 2010 I feel (well, compared to 2026 in the age of AI)
Practically No, the stack-up of metal layers often hides the gate structures underneath, and the billions of process cells may not all be the same.
Theoretically Yes, as an ion-beam-mill and electron-microscope combination machine can slice up semiconductors layer-by-layer. Given these machines can often also give precise x-ray analysis material data, the exact makeup of the chip can be extracted by competitors given enough time. =3
From where do I know the name Dragon Sector and q3k? You aren't the ones who hacked the train DRM, are you? Or maybe active in the demo scene? Or maybe I'm just confusing you with TRSi?
You'll have more luck reverse engineering the software driver first. They're not hidden, you can just open the driver files in Ghidra, the almost-universal tool for open-sourcing proprietary code. Hidden opcodes can be discovered first by just trying all the opcodes you couldn't discover any other way. You only need to go to the physical level if they're really hidden.
Theoretically Yes, as an ion-beam-mill and electron-microscope combination machine can slice up semiconductors layer-by-layer. Given these machines can often also give precise x-ray analysis material data, the exact makeup of the chip can be extracted by competitors given enough time. =3
I was waiting for some writeup about permutation decyphering
https://blog.dragonsector.pl/2017/10/?m=1
but reminds me how we're going to find out on an industrial level when the Saudis give China some nvidia chips they were grifted
they've cloned lots of chips before but nothing that advanced