Yes. That's what so surprising to me. I don't follow the overclocking scene at all, and, up to now, thought they were using sanctioned APIs for overclocking or HW I2C hacks, not SW that can directly access I2C ports to critical components.
The BIOS from last I read was not proved to be working, possibly due to signature check for those specific changes.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1604979/...r-the-reference-rx-480-cards/90#post_25322892
Ah K,In the Elmor thing, they use a HW I2C master, anything is fair game there. But I'm talking specifically of pure SW access: I thought that critical power control infrastructure would be protected by requiring signed binaries or cookies to avoid tampering.
Good point. I thought that those has to be signed as well.
Once you have I2C access to a voltage regulator, there's no more safeguards. Unless they are in the regulator itself, and there's a dead-man switch register to lock in that safeguard.
More unfounded statements, Kepler was the only DX11 Gen that had this happened to it. In fact Kepler aged fine for it's design, it's the GCN cards that caught up later.
More PR saveface progpaganda! Mantle is not a success because now it's not AMD alone controlling it's similar APIs, other vendors are. Now the success of these APIs will not be attributed to AMD alone, but to it's competitors as well and that won't translate to more sales for them, which would have happened if Mantle initiative took off. Mantle is not a success because of all the games that promised to have it, and then dropped support for it immediately, most of these games don't even have DX12 or Vulkan support! (StarWars, NFS, Mirror's Edge) they just dropped Mantle like a bad weight.
Actually there can be some additional safeguards. One can configure the registers of the IR3567B (each one individually) as read only or even block access completely. To gain access to these protected registers, a "password" is required (which can be changed 8 times by programming it to non-volatile memory within the controller). But to my understanding, this protection doesn't appear to be very strong. It's short enough to simply try all possibilities in a reasonable timeframe, if there isn't some limitation for the amount of tries you have (which the datasheet fails to mention).
Has this ever been protetected on GPUs this way though (although ironically in many cases it is protected via the driver-bios)?
It is protected in terms of the driver-BIOS and requires digital signing (this case from AMD) on a per parameter access basis, I agree it is surprising and potentially secure issue it can be done via software such as Afterburner, which is not the same integration-access as the I2C Hardware-Software controller solutions brought up a bit earlier like the Elmor eVc (not suggesting this is the best but is a known solution).
