Story background: Rowhammer Attacks on GPU Memories are Practical (8th Dec 2025)
Preface: The story unfolds a hidden tale within two different design purpose GPUs (consumer display card and AI (install ROCm)) and reveals the untold behind-the-scenes story that the two sides concealed from the recent.
Background: AMD’s bulletin (Dec 2025) confirms GDDR6-based GPUs are vulnerable, but these are consumer display cards, not ROCm-enabled compute cards. This means AMD acknowledges Rowhammer risk on gaming GPUs, even if ROCm isn’t supported. Rowhammer risk exists for certain display (graphics) cards, specifically those with GDDR6 memory used in workstation and data center environments. Researchers recently demonstrated the “GPUHammer” attack, the first successful Rowhammer exploit on a discrete GPU, which can induce bit flips and compromise data integrity or AI model accuracy.
Rowhammer bit flips happen when repeatedly activating (hammering) specific DRAM rows causes electrical interference that causes adjacent “victim” rows to leak charge and flip their stored bit values. This vulnerability exploits the physical limitations of modern, high-density DRAM chips where cells are packed closely together, making them susceptible to disturbance errors.
Does Rowhammer Show on Screen?
Rowhammer is a memory integrity attack, not a rendering pipeline attack. Here’s why:
The workflow you described (PCIe → GDDR6 → cores → display controller) is correct for rendering.
Rowhammer flips bits in memory rows, potentially corrupting data structures (e.g., textures, buffers, or even code).
If the corrupted data is part of a framebuffer or texture, visual artifacts could appear on screen (e.g., glitches, wrong colors).
But if the corruption affects non-visual data (e.g., shader code, compute buffers), you might see crashes or silent errors instead.
So: it can manifest visually, but only if the hammered rows store display-related data.
AMD Official article: Please refer to the link for details.
https://www.amd.com/en/resources/product-security/bulletin/amd-sb-7049.html