The official replies are addressing questions that nobody has asked. The main issue is why Linux support is being removed from the Basic tier while Windows is still allowed.
To grow the ecosystem, AMD needs more people working on their hardware. Restricting Linux will only alienates students, hobbyists, and devs who want to adopt AMD tech.
The official replies started off by addressing ... the "unacceptable abusive behavior towards AMD". The most important thing here is obviously to ask people not to use such hurtful words as "disgraceful" towards poor little AMD...
Answering the actual question seems not a high priority
Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset? Especially when to company has just announced changes that limit what users can do with their products.
The older I get the less I want to deal with companies that act like primadonnas and the technologies they make. This is also why I don’t do phone apps: your market access is 100% controlled by two companies that can wipe out your business overnight.
Imagine having to work with these people professionally. With real money involved. While probably not as high risk as mobile development, their customer representatives seem like real primadonnas. You’ll be happier without these people in your life.
> Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset?
I’m actually fully in favor of empowering customer-facing representatives to put reasonable limits on responding to customer abuse.
It should not be the job of a forum moderator to take abuse. Warning them about the rules of the forum and then enforcing the rules is forum management 101. It’s getting silly that people are attacking this person specifically for just doing their job.
Whether it's directed at you or not, as an employee it's still stressful AF and these people are like getting paid kinda shit wages to put up with people all day long.
I'm not arguing about whether or not this particular instance contained "uncivil comments" (do the mods have the ability there to delete the comments if they are uncivil?)...
But day in day out, on a mass level, it's such a goddamned drag, even if it isn't directed at you, it's energy and emotional bullshit. Every job has it, sometimes it's your boss or shit coworkers... But customer facing is such an awful position for the wages they usually make. Even if it's "good" wages. Even if they don't primarily face the public, but still have to engage in a secondary support role.
I can't imagine what it's like to deal with this as a job when you're on the front line with an angry mob coming at you.
Again on this particular case I'm making no judgement, but it IS a stressor, regardless if directed at you, or not.
Especially in a high volume environment that probably has more incoming vectors of commentary/attack/vitriol than just the single comment thread.
If you want my opinion I think what these mods said had nothing to do with the stress of the environment, they’re just following something of a community moderator trope where they maybe aren’t even employees and at all but enjoy the authority of moderation.
They have no authority or knowledge of the topic at hand at all but can’t resist weighing in and throwing authority around.
> Whether it's directed at you or not, as an employee it's still stressful AF and these people are like getting paid kinda shit wages to put up with people all day long.
You know, it used to be "The customer is always right".
But it's become "Whaat? Are you talking to us you uncivilized, stinky hippy peons? How dare you? We serve only the rich corps now, we don't care about you or your money."
> But customer facing is such an awful position for the wages they usually make.
So you're saying that rich AMD doesn't pay their employees enough and for this reason, their unsatisfied customers should be careful not to say bad things about the company to the employees mistreated by that same company... There are too many logical errors here to describe in a short comment.
When a company screws over entire segments of their customers people get angry. And they don’t get less angry when their frustration is belittled by someone how essentially says “your dissatisfaction means less to us than the words you choose to describe it”.
I don’t want to register for this forum and I’m having trouble finding any kind of a sort. But are you referring to this comment?
* First, any bad language or abusive behaviour towards AMD, is not acceptable. If continued, we will proceed to block your profiles altogether.
If you are not happy with the new tier licensing flow, no one is stopping users (Students etc) to continue using the current versions of Vivado (any Vivado version prior 2026.1) and develop using free Vivado ML Standard Edition.*
If so, I have a different take on this. It could have been worded better, but I don’t think Anatoli is a native English speaker. Based upon a reply to @mkru, I also don’t think they have much visibility into marketing or if they do, they’re not very interested.
* For your specific question: Why is Linux not supported in the BASIC tier?
This is AMD's marketing decision.*
None of this is great, but English isn’t the easiest language to learn and de-escalation involves a specific speech pattern. And of everything they said in the answers I’ve found, ‘this is AMD’s marketing decision’ is the most blunt. Everything else has more information attached except for the little takedown at the beginning.
I know that’s a lot of words to say that I think belittling is a little strong. But brevity is a juicy topic… :)
Communication is tricky because it isn’t just about the words, but how they land. On the surface it may not seem like belittling someone’s pain. In reality this is exactly what it feels like for those on the receiving end. It also doesn’t help that it was delivered with a threat of expulsion. It communicates:
- we don’t care about your pain
- those in charge find it below their dignity to explain the decision to you
- we don’t feel we owe you an explanation, but we’ll take your license fees
- we care more about how you say things than what you say
- you are helpless and we can take away your voice (here) if we want to
Now, the problem isn’t just that some people are not native English speakers — quite a few in our industry come across as not being able to “speak human”. Which makes us prone to put more emphasis on words than how different people in different states of mind read those words.
> Communication is tricky because it isn’t just about the words, but how they land
Please mind that English is not my native language, but as I aged, I found that to be true less and less. Exact word choice does not matter as long as the intent is conveyed properly. With some leeway, maybe benefit of the doubt. And misunderstandings can be cleared up.
In this case, customers are unhappy with the decision. No amount of weaseling around with any kind of word combination is not changing the decision. Whatever tone he might have used here would not help anyone or clear up anything. There is no further misunderstanding.
> Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset
Typical phone CSR boilover from covid days. Most places I call these days have a message saying that they will hang up on you if you act pissy.
> have a message saying that they will hang up on you if you act pissy.
When I had some influence over customer support at a company once I set a similar expectation. We didn’t advertise it up front but if a customer was being abusive over support channels they could be cut off.
Big morale boost for customer support. Abusive customers are rare but they can think it’s their job to attack, threaten, and be uncivil. Being stuck in a position where you’re forced to placate angry man-children sucks.
It’s sad that there are so many comments here trying to attack the forum moderator for moderating the forum.
This person had no hand in the decision making. No reason to treat them as an outlet for anger.
If customer support employees don't want to deal with angry customers they should take a job whose purpose is not dealing with unhappy customers. If you as a company have too many angry customers the response should be to fix your product/service, not to find excuses to ignore those customers.
All you're doing to forcing your customers to find other ways to fix their problems - either by finding someone higher paid than customer support and wasting their time instead or by going to a competitor and telling everyone to do the same.
Seems we have an awful lot of snowflakes in the corporate tech world the last couple years. Can’t take criticism, can’t handle basic questioning of their operation …
That is why techbros cannot make it in politics. I was actually impressed with Zuckerberg: he knows how to wear a suit and did not crumble when EU parliamentarians questioned him.
Some people, including the management of most big corporations, claim that verbal insults, which do no actual physical harm to anyone, are "unacceptable abusive behavior", while the actions that do physical harm to others, e.g. by tricking or forcing them to pay an extra part of their hard-earned money for things that should not have been paid, because they had already been paid in another form, instead of using that money for worthy purposes, are not "unacceptable abusive behavior".
Obviously, I believe that a decision like that made by AMD now is a much more "unacceptable abusive behavior" than any kind of verbal insult ever known to mankind.
This kind of decision is a masked price rise of the AMD FPGAs that applies only to small businesses and individuals, while the big quasi-monopolistic companies are not affected, which will make competing with them even more difficult.
What annoys me most about this kind of policies aimed to hurt small businesses and individuals and favor big companies, which have become more and more frequent, is that in most cases they do not provide any financial benefit whatsoever to the company that enacts them, because they limit competition not in the market where that company activates, but in related markets.
However such policies are very beneficial for the entire class of people who are major shareholders, board members or executives in big companies, by ensuring that all markets are eventually dominated by few, which has happened especially after the end of the nineties of the past century, resulting in the current unhealthy economies of the Western countries and especially of USA.
This success of the quasi-monopolies has been caused by the lack of truly adequate consumer protection laws.
I agree with your point (that AMD does a lot more harm than what they are indignant about) but not the way you go there. If emotional abusive behavior is not "physical harm" because it's just emotions, then financial abusive behavior is not "physical harm" either because it's just numbers. When you consider what incredible harm being emotionally unwell can lead to, I don't think it deserves to be dismissed.
AMD is clearly just putting on a performance here though, using the backlash they get as a weapon.
Yea insulting and being verbally abusive towards individuals is something that it's worth taking action against. My problem with AMD's response is simply that they take issue with "bad language or abusive behavior towards AMD".
NGL that phrase reads as an "ESL-ism" where the intended phrasing is "towards AMD moderators/employees/whatever" i.e. "Don't be a dick to the people trying to help/answer questions" not "don't be mean to the company".
Other quirks with their writing style seem to lend support to this being an "ESL-ism" as well.
It would be more accurate to say that what AMD is doing is causing material harm, while a few mean words directed towards an anonymous megacorp are not.
The replies here are horrifying. Yes corporations are not people. But they are made up of people. I'd imagine most here work in them yourselves. Often less well paid support staff who have to read, and try to respond, to such terrible behavior. As one of those support people myself I can assure you it takes a toll.
Do you genuinely think that support staff reads "this decision made by AMD is disgraceful" and feel personally attacked because they identify as "part of AMD" and therefore an attack on AMD's honor is an attack on theirs?
Don't get me wrong, support staff often gets abuse thrown their way in a way that is absolutely not okay. There's a lot of people out there who
get angry at the support personale. That's not what we're talking about here. Support staff needs thick enough skin to hear, "AMD did something bad" and not take it personally.
The entire point of support staff is to stand between unhappy customers and the rest of the company. If they don't think their pay reflects the responsibilities that that entails then they should ask for a raise, not make excuses to ignore customers that the company has failed to serve.
Its just numbers only for rich. For poor ir can be the differnce between employability and not. In general, I believe that non-free tools like this are effective violence against poor nations since they trap those societies in unskilled sectors.
AMD is not a person. It has no emotions. Any perceived emotional harm by humans is them projecting themselves onto the AMD entity. Whereas AMDs actions here cause real harm to individuals.
AMD and any other corpo is made of people, who do have emotions. Abuse towards these people impacts corp operations. This is an entity protecting itself from damage that it feels is not worth the benefit the offering would bring.
And I question your assertion of real harm to individuals, by not offering free support, being worse than receiving verbal abuse.
Right, but saying "this policy change is disgraceful" and saying "you, customer support person, are an insufferable dickhead" are very different things. From what I can see in the link comments, people seem to be saying mostly the former.
Was the abuse and response directed at a person or AMD? Even AMDs response is vague and deflects it as “Abuse towards AMD”
AMD is free to change their terms of their product, but then characterizing the backlash as abuse towards AMD is laughable. Have empathy for people not corporations
There are still individuals, who make up the company, who have to read and try to formulate responses to said abusive behavior. It's usually the lower paid support staff not the engineers or C suite who have those duties. As one of those people I can confirm it absolutely takes a toll.
Nah, feel free to insult any company I have worked for or even the company that I am one of the founders of. I don't see why that should be off limits. But do not insult me as a person.
> Answering the actual question seems not a high priority
This is a clear sign of propaganda and bullshitting by them.
Because answering the actual question would be easy, unless
you deliberately want to harass linux users. Perhaps a
Barbara Streisand effect kicks in, because people are now
sharpening their ears and eyes as to why they harass linux
users specifically.
I also have to admit that while my main operating system is
linux, on my left side I have a windows computer too. I
found this approach more practical, even though I think Linux
is far superior to windows. This abuse by private entities to
try to force everyone to use winows, is anonying to no ends
though.
Yeah that was hilarious, pretty much instantly closed the tab when I read that.
Oh please mister, won't you please think of the little billion dollar corporation's feelings? They're only poor corporations with nothing to their names but their billion dollar businesses! Won't you think of the starving corporations?!
Probably a good thing I don't run a company, because I wouldn't put energy into responding to the kind of comments they're addressing. If you use a support channel the same way a teenager uses Reddit, you should count to ten and try again later.
That said, the tone and basic grammar of AMD's support rep isn't what I would've expected either.
They did answer the question, though:
> AMD expectation is that the BASIC tier licensing level is used for simple, entry‑level needs. While more advanced, production-based workflows are aligned with paid tiers.
In other words, they're saying hobbyists and beginners are on Windows anyway, and students can get a free version if they apply through the right channels. No more freebies.
AMD wants people to pay for their software. Instead of going "why are you bullying Linux users", AMD customers should probably be going "thank god the Windows version is still free (for now)"
You're kind of doing the job for them here by inventing a connection between Linux and "simple, entry-level needs". Plenty of Linux users have "simple, entry-level needs"; nothing about using Windows automatically makes you needs simpler. If that is indeed their argument, they ought to have spelled it out.
> In other words, they're saying hobbyists and beginners are on Windows anyway
I suspect they're massively underestimating how many hobbyists and students are on Linux. We're not talking about a typical demographic here, we're talking about people interested in computers and technology at precisely the level that Windows and MacOS aim to isolate from the user.
"Well, some guy in marketing figured that we could make more money by charging more money, especially for things that we didn't previously charge money for. This was validated by ChatGPT as the kind of brilliant insight that qualifies someone for an MBA. You may take some solace in the fact that we somehow managed to preserve a free version for broke idiots who use Windows."
MBAs are mercenaries, that's part of their formation. They fully expect to be working somewhere else when things start looking bad.
They are just doing what mercenaries have been doing for millennia : cost a lot in peace time, loot the population, and run away or cut a deal with the invader when the goings get though.
A good example is the Russian "Africa Corp" in Mali. Expensive, atrocities against the population and cut a deal with the jihadist to run away when they came last month.
Usually it's just some idiot manager trying to juice quarterly numbers and get promoted. Then they jump to another company and the damage takes years to kick in.
When they do not have any justifiable answer, or don't want to answer, but need to keep the facade on, they'll sidestep and tell you how hard they are working on something, and how many unrelated things they've archived.
- A regular tactic used by our former autocratic ruler, or most corrupted people
I think many haven't read that part, as it is hidden by default and one have to expand the answer to see it. At least that was what happened to me... I didn't noticed it until you pointed it out.
a.k.a. Just use a microcontroller. And for the vast majority of hobby projects I suspect that is good advice. Low end FPGAs don't compete well with low end microcontrollers and more people know how to use microcontrollers.
I think the reality is the niche that FPGAs occupied is getting hit hard on the high and low end. Cheap Chinese FPGAs are prevalent, cheap microcontrollers more so, and on the high-end making an ASIC that compete with a high-end FPGA has never been cheaper, and is getting cheaper and easier everyday. 65-28nm is very easy to use now (relatively speaking) and is very low cost with tons of tape outs and there is good competition. Beating an FPGA with an ASIC is not all that hard. Grad students at CMU, Stanford, Georgia Tech, etc. do it all the time in their tape-out class. Making an ASIC is not as easy as an FPGA for sure, especially if you need DDR and serdes. And NRE for ASICs for small volume ( <1K units) is higher. But it is getting easier and cheaper everyday. And it's now feasible for small teams (say ~6) to do it. I think they need to look very hard at where they spend their NRE now to stay relevant and they need to start getting brutal because I am sure the amount of revenue they're bringing in is under serious attack.
As to why Windows and not Linux? It's probably cheaper for them to maintain Windows for one reason or another. Maybe they don't even do it an just contract it out and Windows contractors are easier to find, but I'll bet it's just a basic cost issue at the end of the day.
Are you seriously suggesting hobbyists should tapeout an ASIC instead of use an FPGA?
1. For one-off designs (quantity=1) ASICs will never beat a high end FPGA on unit price.
2. As a hobbyist, you want to EXPERIMENT. You cannot do that with an ASIC. Hobbyists want to do something simple, test it on real hardware, and slowly build up from that. I don't have the time nor expertise nor motivation to spend months writing verification to get it right the first time for a tapeout.
"Just use a microcontroller"... I will concede that microcontrollers do cover 90% of hobbyists use cases (that number increasing by the day). But for hobbyists sometimes you want to learn HDL or digital logic or computer engineering. You can do this hands on with a FPGA much more effectively than in software.
> It's probably cheaper for them to maintain Windows for one reason or another.
They already need to maintain the Linux build for all the other paid tiers?? These are the same software with different features locked behind a license key. It costs them NOTHING to keep the build enabled for free tier.
> Are you seriously suggesting hobbyists should tapeout an ASIC instead of use an FPGA?
No. I said the low-end of FPGA sales is getting eaten by microcontrollers and the high-end of FPGAs sales is probably about to get eaten by custom ASICs.
Although the cost of making an ASIC is high, in the larger nodes it's not that high, and getting ever cheaper at FPGA performance levels and logic densities. FPGAs are terribly inefficient with their HW they're very easy to beat with an ASIC. They only get away with it because the NRE today is lower. But it's not an order of magnitude lower and I'm not sure how much longer that will be the case in nodes at 28nm and larger based on what I know Universities pay in tape-out classes.
Will there be very low qty projects where the NRE of developing an ASIC overwhelms that of an ASIC, sure. But will there be enough business in that niche to sustain the business of AMD, Intel and Lattice? Not obvious.
And I don't think the FPGA hobbyist market of people who "want to learn HDL" spends enough money to affect what's coming and this decision from AMD reflects that.
> 1. For one-off designs (quantity=1) ASICs will never beat a high end FPGA on unit price.
Never say never. These guys were able to convince investors you're wrong about that. :)
> No. I said the low-end of FPGA sales is getting eaten by microcontrollers and the high-end of FPGAs sales is probably about to get eaten by custom ASICs.
You have absolutely no idea what an ASIC costs compared to a FPGA. A FPGA that can compete with a tinytapeout chip costs a few dollars at most in extremely low quantites. Something high performance would need probably TSMC 12nm or similar at a minimum. At that point, you're talking $1M+ between licensing fees and direct costs to just go on a shuttle. If you want to make your own higher volume run or can't wait for shuttle spot, you're looking easily $5-10M minimum for your first 6 wafers. Comparatively, FPGAs competitive with TSMC 12nm run from a few hundred dollars up to several thousand dollars each. So for low volume, they're very competitive.
Are you sure you actually know what you're talking about?
FPGA unit costs keep doing down and they usually tend to use a recent manufacturing process. Meanwhile the fixed NRE costs of ASICs keep going up the more advanced the manufacturing process is.
An FPGA consists of non programmable logic components such as DSPs, block RAM, NoCs, SERDES/configurable IO, that keep scaling with the manufacturing process.
If you try to replicate this with an older process to cut costs, you will have an area and energy efficiency penalty.
This means that FPGAs have become more relevant over time.
> Just use a microcontroller. And for the vast majority of hobby projects I suspect that is good advice.
I recently bought a hobby FPGA kit because I think the Von Neumann model is a beautiful innovation and I want to learn more about doing useful computation tasks from the lowest level logical components. I've always been interested in computers, but when I was in grade school the only useful computers I could afford were discarded PCs that I brought back to life with Linux distros. I now have a fulfilling career as a direct result of access to cheap hardware and open-source software when I had much more time and much less money than I do now. Decisions like AMD's are a long-term negative for the industry.
The only reason why the "Linux community" cannot create adequate FPGA design tools is that the vendors like AMD refuse to document the necessary details of their products.
A few old AMD FPGAs have been reversed engineered, e.g. some ARTIX-7, so for them there is no need for the rather bad AMD tools, but for most AMD formerly Xilinx FPGAs it is impossible to create better tools for lack of documentation.
As long as AMD refuses to provide the technical documentation required to use their products, it should have been a legal obligation to at least provide basic tools that allows the buyer of such products to actually use "FPGAs", i.e. to "field-program" them, as the name of the sold product claims.
Like many other FPGA developers, I could write myself better FPGA development tools than what AMD provides, if I had access to the complete FPGA technical documentation to which only a few big companies have access, a restriction whose only possible purpose is to prevent competition in the FPGA market.
If AMD had documented the exact format of the bit stream required to program each model of their FPGAs and the complete timing consequences of each synthesis choice, nobody would need any FPGA simulation or synthesis tool provided by AMD in Vivado.
It's no more a bribe than having to pay money to buy the latest C++ standard when implementing a C++ compiler. The reality is that companies pay each other for partnerships all of the time. There is value to AMD for keeping this documentation secret and there is value for having control over what design tools exist for them. It makes sense that AMD would want to be compensated in this case and would not want to do work for free which could undermine their business.
The hardware is not in a broken state of usability since you can still buy usable design software.
> It's no more a bribe than having to pay money to buy the latest C++ standard when implementing a C++ compiler.
The C++ standard group didn't just sell me a piece of hardware that only runs C++, in a world where no free C++ compilers exist.
That analogy isn't even close.
> There is value to AMD for keeping this documentation secret
It's a value that doesn't deserve respect.
> It makes sense that AMD would want to be compensated in this case and would not want to do work for free which could undermine their business.
Their business is selling the hardware. Their money should come from selling the hardware.
I'm not demanding a free full-featured development environment. I think they should have to document the hardware and maybe provide a basic compiler. If they want to sell something beyond that, no problem.
> The hardware is not in a broken state of usability since you can still buy usable design software.
And if you don't?
It's a fixable broken state with enough money, but it's still a broken state.
Then how about the instruction manuals for the processors themselves. It's really not that different. People spend a lot of time and resources building something and compiling information and you are demanding to get it for free.
>It's a value that doesn't deserve respect.
It does deserve respect as a lot of people put in work in creating it and creating a successful product. If you think it's not that much effort to do then find someone to make their own FPGA and documentation for it.
>Their business is selling the hardware. Their money should come from selling the hardware.
It is rare for a business to be so 1 dimensional. Businesses have many income streams. Even for the same product. Take for example the iPhone. Apple gets income from people buying the device. Income from companies for letting them sell things in the App Store. Income from Google for setting Google as the default search provider.
>And if you don't?
If you refuse to get a compatible computer for the free software to flash the chips then you can't flash the chips for free. The chips are still fully functional and if you sold them to someone else they could program them.
> Then how about the instruction manuals for the processors themselves.
Those should come with the processor.
> People spend a lot of time and resources building something and compiling information and you are demanding to get it for free.
Documentation for a product should always be "free" when you buy that product.
Which is far from being "free" in the normal sense of the word.
> It does deserve respect as a lot of people put in work in creating it and creating a successful product. If you think it's not that much effort to do then find someone to make their own FPGA and documentation for it.
I respect the effort. I don't respect the competitive advantage gained by withholding documentation.
Was my meaning that unclear? I quoted the exact thing I don't respect.
> It is rare for a business to be so 1 dimensional. Businesses have many income streams. Even for the same product. Take for example the iPhone. Apple gets income from people buying the device. Income from companies for letting them sell things in the App Store. Income from Google for setting Google as the default search provider.
Some of those streams are more acceptable than others. Apple's income from Google is fine. Their income from the App Store would be fine if it wasn't mandatory, and is much less fine when it is mandatory. Paid documentation is pretty far into bad territory.
> If you refuse to get a compatible computer for the free software to flash the chips then you can't flash the chips for free. The chips are still fully functional and if you sold them to someone else they could program them.
In this case you can get Windows.
What if they stopped having the free Windows version either? Because the way you're talking about this situation it sounds like you would also call that acceptable.
They are useless for most people who buy the processor, even transitively. For people who will get called out of it, it makes sense to let companies charge for that value.
>Documentation for a product should always be "free" when you buy that product.
I feel this viewpoint does not value the work it takes to compile all of this information. Nor does it acknowledge how full documentation could reveal sensitive information. There is no reason for consumers to need to know how microcode instructions work since they will never be able to properly sign a microcode update. People will always like getting valuable stuff for free so you can't justify something by looking at how happy people are by getting value for free.
This also gets into a potential slippery slope where things like schematics or repair information, or even source code is forced to be given away for free. Confidential IP is a common part of many businesses and offers a tangible competitive advantage.
>I don't respect the competitive advantage gained by withholding documentation. Was my meaning that unclear?
What I was implying is that by forcing people to give up their hard work for free you are calling their work worthless. Finding innovative ways to make a product better deserves to be rewarded.
>Because the way you're talking about this situation it sounds like you would also call that acceptable.
I do think it's acceptable. I also think it's acceptable for them to charge money to sell you a programmer to use with the chip too. I don't think they have to give you the physical hardware to flash it with every chip they send you.
I'm not at all calling it worthless. It's very valuable. But I think it's a value that every owner deserves access to. And for IP licensing? If it's mandatory companies will figure it out.
If your competitive advantage needs you to not even release documentation, does it really? Really? Well the societal benefits are more important, sorry.
And it's still not giving up work for free. It's telling companies to sell these two things together.
A physical programmer is different because those have a marginal cost.
>Then how about the instruction manuals for the processors themselves. It's really not that different. People spend a lot of time and resources building something and compiling information and you are demanding to get it for free.
x86_64 processors maintain backwards compatibility. This means you can reverse engineer one chip and then have your software work on a different processor from a different company.
FPGAs don't even retain compatibility between different sizes of the same base model. If you reverse engineer one chip that's only one chip.
>It does deserve respect as a lot of people put in work in creating it and creating a successful product. If you think it's not that much effort to do then find someone to make their own FPGA and documentation for it.
I'm not sure why companies and online forum people defending the company are so obsessed with making their products less valuable, driving away customers and making less money in the long run. The financial incentives point exactly in the opposite direction.
>It is rare for a business to be so 1 dimensional. Businesses have many income streams
Why does it matter if it is rare? The only thing that matters is that you're making money. Why do I have to explain this?
Nvidia obtained a 5 trillion market by selling the hardware and giving the software to program and run on it away for free. Why do you hate it when AMD makes money?
Linux developers are supposed to build their own software and to do so they have to pay AMD for documentation under an NDA that prevents them from developing an open source toolchain?
What kind of logic is that? This is especially stupid since AMD benefits from every single FPGA sale so all they did was reduce the number of FPGAs they will sell, by locking out customers.
It's a pretty low risk if you don't put your identity out there. I know there's at least one Git forge that's a Tor onion service. Even on GitHub 99% of the time this ends with a DMCA takedown of the repository. You should probably put it on a pseudonymous alt account but you don't actually need to use a Tor onion service.
You could also get someone else to put their name on the web hosting and so on. Don't know who exactly, but there are a lot more people willing to take legal risk of having reverse-engineered an FPGA toolchain, than people who can reverse-engineer an FPGA toolchain. Doing the work is what's most important, and the rest can be figured out later. But you don't even see that. You don't see people being like "I reverse-engineered Vivado but I won't give you a copy because I could get sued."
"Doing the work is what's most important, and the rest can be figured out later."
I would say for most people his means they won't start the work if they don't know whether there is a way. Also most people like to get credit for their work. So the number of people capable AND willing to work without getting credit is low. And that is not surprising to me.
It is not my skill set, but I certainly would not invest much into something like this.
> You don't see people being like "I reverse-engineered Vivado but I won't give you a copy because I could get sued."
Eh, not Vivado, but back in my undergrad days I RE/cracked a tool used in a very specific niche and definitely kept my mouth shut as the developers could a) do some investigation and then sue me, a student without any legal budget to spare; b) improve copy protection on future releases; and/or c) prevent my access to future versions of the tool that I was using for my thesis.
On other threads about Denuvo you always see somebody saying they've got the chops but the risk to their livelihoods is not worth it.
I think there are a lot of (now) hobbyist reverse-engineers that learned the craft back in the day and kept the knowledge for themselves.
Vivado already supports Linux, the development is supported by very large customers that put FPGAs in cars, [REDACTED], and other kinds of objects that crash into other objects.
AMD has been unable to not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for ages. I'd almost say someone high up is getting kickbacks from their competitors.
As for hobbyists, in the world of $0.03 microcontrollers, strong competition on the low end from Chinese manufacturers, and where few people learn HDLs, is NRE money in the hobby market really money well spent?
I'm a HW designer and even I use microcontrollers now for most things, but not everything, because it's usually cheaper and faster.
With semiconductor prices coming down as far as they have I think the world has probably fundamentally changed for FPGAs and the niche they occupied is shrinking fast.
The notion of being expected to pay for software that was formerly free - when Windows users aren't expected to bear those same costs - does indeed piss me off.
If I were actually using Xilinx FPGAs I'd be more pissed off. Luckily the projects that interest me currently are based around Intel, Lattice and Gowin devices.
More like the notion of seeing different treatment between OSes. No one likes being punished for a choice that shouldn't be any of the selling party's business. That's especially true in the Linux community, which was the target of Microsoft's anticompetitive policies for decades.
That's just like when macOS users got mad when they learned they were targeted by marketing schemes to sell them more expensive stuff [1].
AMD is making more than enough money from hardware sales to fund the software that actually makes is usable.
Even Apple doesn't charge you for the software needed to actually be able to use their devices (well since around Snow Leopard or so, at least).
But I suppose the idea of not being as greedy as possible really "pisses off" AMD's executives (and presumably some of the people shilling for them here).
And presumably you didn't read the article since AMD will continue to support this on Linux anyway.
I get what you're saying but I can understand the frustration here. Vivado licenses start at $1200/year or $5000 for a perpetual license.. Just to use software to work with hardware that you already paid for. And it's not like they are dropping support for Linux altogether, it would cost them nothing to continue supporting Linux in the free tier.
It just seems like a weird decision on AMD's part.
I’ve spent several hundred thousand on Xilinx FPGAs yet they nickel and dime me for licenses. It’s not the cost that’s a problem—-it’s the hassle of making a PO for a license to set up new computers, set up CI, hiring new teammates, setting up for interns/students. Xilinx has continued to go downhill since their acquisition by AMD.. it used to feel like it was run by engineers who understood their customers, now it seems to be getting taken over by the MBA crowd who only understands pinching pennies and chiseling their own loyal customers
Yep. Strategy Letter V by Joel Spolsky (2002): "Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements". Also, from the 2004's "How Microsoft Lost the API War":
The logical conclusion of this is that if you’re trying to sell operating systems,
the most important thing to do is make software developers want to develop software
for your operating system. That’s why Steve Ballmer was jumping around the stage
shouting “Developers, developers, developers, developers.” It’s so important for
Microsoft that the only reason they don’t outright give away development tools for
Windows is because they don’t want to inadvertently cut off the oxygen to competitive
development tools vendors (well, those that are left) because having a variety of
development tools available for their platform makes it that much more attractive to
developers. But they really want to give away the development tools. Through their
Empower ISV program you can get five complete sets of MSDN Universal (otherwise known
as “basically every Microsoft product except Flight Simulator“) for about $375.
Command line compilers for the .NET languages are included with the free .NET
runtime... also free. The C++ compiler is now free. Anything to encourage developers
to build for the .NET platform, and holding just short of wiping out companies like
Borland.
Although it also means Windows could rely on Intel so long for compiler tools, that when I was trying to build for ARM customers, I realized a lot of the expected developer tools are just barely functional or don’t exist (ifort, MKL, gdb, mingw, etc)
Similarly, AMD wonders why they can't have a bigger piece of that sweet GPU market. Maybe Nvidia is worth 5 trillion because they have a deep ecosystem (CUDA) and community and there's certainly not charging or impeding developers from using it, charging only for the hardware.
I can get parts, they're part of a BOM that gets approved, but getting POs approved for software is a pain in the ass. Been considering switching next gen stuff to microchip.
About 25 years ago I did some work on Xilinx FPGAs. The hardware was nice. The ability to get them free (as a business development strategy) as a research user was nice [0]. The quality of the software stack was awful. The FPGAs were getting big enough that the synthesis process could need more 4GB of user memory, but the tools were barely functional on 64-bit systems of any sort, and this was far from the only problem.
It’s too bad that a vendor with only slightly worse hardware hasn’t eaten Xilinx’s lunch by having a genuinely pleasant development process. These companies aren’t selling synthesis tools — they’re selling hardware. Make the developers want to use it! (Intel, for all their faults, understands this.)
[0] It takes a special sort of incompetence to take 5 figures worth of fancy chips, stick them in a poorly packaged box, write only part of the address in it, and hope that FedEx will deliver it somewhere useful.
Xilinx has often thought of the software as the special sauce that sets them apart it seems like.
At this point its a net negative. Nothing like a massive bloated Vivado that now requires a slow spywareOS to run its rotting carcass of gigabytes (100's) of java.
About the only good thing Vivado does is fail to synthesize correctly... oh wait that's a mystery bug that I and many others have run into. And impossible to understand why.
FPGA tooling desperately needs open source tooling like C needed GCC.
We've had good experiences with Lattice parts. Their software tools are free for all of their basic chips. They only charge for licensing when you use the higher end SKUs with SerDes. Example, you can use and develop on an ECP5 or Certus using their free license, but then you need a paid license to work on ECP5-5G or CertusPro chips.
They're not perfect, but they're better to work with than Xilinx. Also, their datasheetd are better than Xilinx in my experience.
FWIW I'm using Yosis for my Ice40 Lattice FPGA purely because their Linux support is bad.
Getting a free hobby license requires emailing them with MAC addresses (which means I have to do that for my desktop, laptop, and again for any future machine I may get). Then getting the tools to actually run on Linux seemed to be impossible that I just gave up.
It's not clear that I have the Yosys and open source options for my Xilinx based fpgas.
I came in here to recommend Lattice as well, at least for small glue-logic type applications. I've used their various MaxhXO lines extensively and really enjoy working with them.
Eh... unfortunately they shut down their forums a couple of years ago. So good luck getting any form of support as a free user even if you run into real bugs in their software (believe me, I tried...)
That being said, I have used their ice40 and ECP5 FPGAs with Yosys for a couple of small projects and that worked perfectly fine.
This is the obvious reaction. I wonder what AMD expected would happen if they cut off users, but the obvious expectation is that they'd start looking for alternatives. Especially Linux users, who are not typically inclined to pay licenses for software.
I didn’t like that you are not supporting Linux in your free tier.
Edit: if it is not clear, the way you treat the community is one way I evaluate my decisions to support or not your company when I suggest using your products to others, students or not.
I have, and compared to just running Linux it's not very good. For starters, the shared filesystem is incredibly slow, there is no hardware passthrough support out of the box (even for USB), the graphics support is incomplete and there's lots of non-standard defaults like custom kernel images and a custom init. That's on top of all the bugs and horrible error reporting.
It still beats Windows, but given the choice, I'd much rather just use Linux properly and have all of this just work than waste my time fiddling with WSL/WSL2.
The open source community has hijacked VBox drivers to get USB pass through working and is the official solution from Microsoft to that problem (since it requires a signed driver on the host, and RedHat was authorized to sign drivers, so Microsoft can provide their drivers to work around the signing requirements of the OS)
AMD dropped support for Linux on the free plan, not the other way around. Nor is this a Linux problem, because they still allow paid users to run the software on Linux.
As far as what's evident from the support thread goes, this is the closest to a justification given:
> AMD expectation is that the BASIC tier licensing level is used for simple, entry‑level needs. While more advanced, production-based workflows are aligned with paid tiers.
Looks like AMD equates Linux to professional use and Windows to simple, entry-level needs :)
If Microsoft didn't have a good operating system it wouldn't have such a dominant market share for the free tier of Vivado. If the Linux community actually properly competed and gained 50% market share then support would not have been dropped. You can't blame companies giving up on Linux on the company itself. Eventually the Linux community will need to take responsibility for their failures.
As a long time Altera user, one of the biggest things that made me want to jump the fence to Xilinx was the MUCH stronger community and hobbyist uptake. Xilinx benefitted from a ton of people out there educating others on their behalf.
Trying to shrink that community seems like a pretty obvious error. The closest thing the Altera world ever had were the old Altera user forums, which were a gold-mine. Intel shut them down immediately on acquisition. I guess it's AMD's turn.
As someone who actually worked for one of the largest FPGA consumers in the world, Xilinx didn't benefit at all from the community and hobbyist uptake. It was just an unnecessary expense and distraction that got in the way of their core mission. Around 5-10 companies make up around 70% of all FPGA silicon sales and the single largest end user is the U.S. Government and its customers (NATO members, Israel, Australia, Japan, South Korea, etc.). Now that cloud took off, FPGAs are somewhat more used in cloud deployments but usually as a stopgap measure until an ASIC can be developed. And putting the lines on the football field has finally stopped being one of the largest consumers because the broadcasters finally learned that they can load new programming onto the FPGAs instead of just ordering new hardware every time something changes.
Trying to read between the lines, here are my lazy sunday morning guesses at what might be going on here:
1. The Xilinx team are pushing back on the increasing number of things they have to support. Silver lining, maybe this means they're being asked to work on a new product that will require redistribution of headcount (like maybe another NPU )
1.1. Their Linux expertise is lacking / stretched across multiple teams (this is the impression I got from following the work in github.com/amd/xdna-driver over the last year or two). Maybe this is the outcome of a 'these are the things i'm doing now, so if you want me to do something new then tell me which of these things I can drop' type conversation & where the pushback is coming from (maybe we'll get some fedora support in that repo though ) .
2. Marketing have been pushing for something that helps them 'fight the AI fight', and it may be that they've now been given the mandate so the division is in the midst of the typical top-down mythical man-day reallocation wave. Xilinx have probably been told that priorities are shifting towards integrating more of the Xilinx inference tech with more mainstream AMD products, possibly at the expense of their existing roadmap. Xilinx have tenured employees who know what they're doing and don't want to retrain/change, so this is a side-effect of the pushback.
3. This is a straight-up monetisation strategy. Marketing ran a project and concluded thta it's just not worth supporting that lower tier for free. It may be that even though have a majority Windows userbase, the [commercially serious | higher stakes | CICD pipeline based] development actually happens on Linux, and this is them closing that loop. Not quite a Docker Desktop situation, but maybe not that dissimilar - they're saying that most professional/commercial users are Linux users, and the days of unlimited free commercial use on the smaller devices are over. Maybe the margins on those lower end devices aren't good enough to justify the amount of support overhead, and pay-to-play will filter out the noise and ensure they're talking to users who are already bought-in. Or, maybe somebody just needs an earnings blip on a slide somewhere, and this is them milking their startup/smb customers.
What I suspect is more likely (given the couple of comments saying "you have to pay to run it on a server") -- Some higher-up in AMD's marketing department has the misconception that Linux isn't a real desktop operating system but is only run on servers. Therefore, all their Linux users are probably companies running Vivaldi on a server, likely using a LLM to do designs. And they should be paying for that.
Yeah, apart from there is more to supporting a product than just compiling a binary.
Case in point, the HN post you're commenting on is a link to their support forum. Search for _anything_ there, and this the pinned article that appears on top of every results page (from feb 2024):
> Is your Operating System supported by ISE/Vivado tools? Assistance and support won’t be provided for software and IP installed on unsupported OS!
> Note: Technical Support and assistance will be provided ONLY for Software and IP installed on supported Operating System!
> It is strongly suggested to check if the OS you are working with, is one of the supported operating system for ISE/Vivado tools!
*There have been many questions where users are trying to install or run into issues with using an unsupported OS for ISE/Vivado tools.*
> Assistance and support won’t be provided for issues observed on unsupported operating system!
This sucks. I was working on a video course on building CPUs on an FPGA that uses Vivado (because I am somewhat familiar with the ecosystem and have dev boards with Artix FPGAs).
I am still contemplating my options. I can still use Vivado 2025, I guess, but I am not sure that is the right direction.
What are realistic alternatives for Vivado? (Taking into account the availability of supported affordable entry-level dev boards?)
For teaching / learning it's hard to beat Quartus Prime Lite - the virtual JTAG infrastructure (for SignalTap logic analyzer) is much better than the other options. (It's easy to create custom virtual JTAG modules to control and read data from a running design, and these will happily coexist with the logic analyzer.)
Dev board wise QMTech on AliExpress have some really nice entry-level dev boards - the Cyclone 10CL025 board, the daughter board and a clone USB-Blaster cable for programming would weigh in at well under £100.
Terasic have a bunch of different Intel/Altera dev boards, the cheapest being the DE0-Nano - personally I like the DE10-lite, but there are more modern options for those with deeper pockets.
The Tang Nano 20k is a solid and affordable choice for a Gowin chip (though be aware that this particular chip's PLLs are a bit limited and its block RAMs don't have byte enables). The JTAG stuff works but isn't anywhere near as advanced as Intel's.
For Lattice ECP5 there are several options - and these chips are well-supported by yosys/nextpnr and oss-cad-suite in general.
I quite like the IceSugar-Pro ECP5-based board and associated breakout board - but it has a quirky built-in JTAG adapter which isn't supported by the Lattice toolchain, so you'll have to use OpenOCD or OpenFPGALoader to program it, and you can't use the vendor-supplied internal logic analyzer. Its FPGA is well supported by oss-cad-suite, though, which is a big plus.
IcePi-Zero is also well worth considering, available from CrowdSupply.
ULX3S is very nice, too - but as far as I can see it's only available for pre-order on the next production run.
Thank you for your reply! I did a bit of research and, since I do want to use quite some peripherals, I have gone for the ULX3S. A big factor here was documentation and availability; If I would have been able to find a MiSTer Pi I might have gone for that instead.
I now bought a ULX3S on a whim, and will at least evaluate how usable it is for my purposes. It will take quite some time to familiarize myself with a new toolchain, which kinda sucks. One advantage of these big proprietary IDEs is that they integrate a lot of functionality into one "unit" (as far as the user/programmer is concerned), instead of having to install a lot of separate tools.
For the course, I am now considering to "support" an AMD board, an Intel one, and a Lattice one.
oss-cad-suite will give you the open source toolchain for ULX3S in one convenient package.
There are plenty of example projects and other resources, plus a discord server. https://ulx3s.github.io/
(Also, to download Lattice Diamond you'll need to make an account on the Lattice website which then needs to be activated. I tried that using a gmail account, and it was never activated - I had to use an email address related to one of my own domains.)
Charging for Vivado has always struck me as ridiculous. It's a software dongle that enables Xilinx hardware, and the hardware is how they make money. Give Vivado away for free and support it on Linux and Mac, and you'll sell 10x as many chips.
The cost of the tooling is probably blocking a few sales, but the biggest blocker for FPGA sales is price of the parts themselves. FPGAs make the most sense where absolute quantities are low and the customer is not cost-sensitive.
As soon as you get volume, ASIC wins out. And cost sensitive applications can almost always make do with a CPU that has the correct IO configuration. For FPGAs to win at scale they'd need to be significantly cheaper.
It feels like bean counter logic. They have a development budget with x% towards linux support which is not enough to fully support linux, so they want linux users to pay to help fund the development. It makes sense in some ways, but I would think the entire software suite would be a loss leader to sell hardware. Less barriers to entry and all that.
except their tools are all the linux ecosystem compiled to windows... it is all gcc based and their tutorials recommends those terminals that mimick Unix. it smells stupid managers + microsoft interference.
Dropping Linux support on the free tier feels like a huge step backward for hobbyists and students. So many academic and open source FPGA workflows rely entirely on Linux environments.
It's really unfortunate that FPGA development is still stuck in the 90s. The incentives between IP owners and hobbyists are so misaligned that I don't see the possibility of this ever improving.
The market is full of dark patterns, and vendors like AMD/Xilinx can pull shitty moves like what OP highlighted, knowing there is no decent alternative (Altera is another disaster). Lattice had the opportunity to fully embrace opensource toolchain and try to disrupt from the bottom, but they seem stuck in the middle, not wanting to commit one way or another.
I'm grateful to SymbiFlow, and IceStorm and others, even though they obviously lack support for proprietary hardware features.
I agree. Once upon a time I was quite interested in FPGAs but the infrastructure being so uninviting in general made me move on completely. I was somewhat recently involved in quantizing neural networks with FINN (AMD) and let's just say...that was a pretty bad experience overall.
Yes, same here. Did my thesis on reconfigurable co-processors in the 00s, then quickly moved away from that market due to the atrocious tooling availability and OS support once I was no longer a student.
So does Quartus Prime Pro - and for specific Agilex 5 devices it's also free.
(Presumably it was too much trouble to backport support for Agilex to the Lite version.)
There are also free Linux versions of Lattice Diamond, Gowin EDA and Efinix's Efinity software.
The difficult part is the place and route algorithm, not the bitstream. The proprietary ones already take quite a long time to solve: I regularly have 12-24h runs. Perhaps an open source one could do better? But it's not quite as straightforward as reverse engineering a proprietary bitstream.
As someone actively working on nextpnr support for a fairly new FPGA architecture, it really is amazing that we have something like that in the open source world.
YosysHQ are one of my favorite companies to exist.
Nextpnr and Project X-Ray are amazing projects. Reverse engineering the physical map of, say, a 7-series FPGA is no small feat. However, I wonder if they'll ever be able to really compete with Vivado without getting access to the characterization models for timing. I would love to switch over, but the Fmax of my project routed with nextpnr is less than half of what I get with Vivado.
When I first started doing chip design my boss paid more for tools per year than he paid me ... now days open source tool chains are leaping ahead ... I don't need a boss (or VCs) in order to design chips
I have to admit that I haven't looked too closely into this but my understanding is that place & route is essentially an NP hard optimization problem. Would it be possible to translate this into a SAT problem and solve it with a state of the art SAT solver?
It's surely possible but if it's, for example, 10% slower, that easily eats into execution time and that directly translates into a sense of "maybe it's just worth it to pay the license fee for this year" after just a few 20h place and route runs.
Of course, if it were faster, that would be a huge win for the open source implementation.
For reverse engineering, you still need access to the FPGA tools provided by the vendor, to see what changes in the bitstream when you change the design.
If the bitstream is encrypted, you will not see the changes, so the only way is to reverse engineer the Vivado executables.
You do not need only the bitstream, but you also need a huge amount of timing parameters. In theory, they could be obtained by fuzzing, but that would require a huge amount of executions of the Vivado tools. So again the most plausible method is to reverse engineer the Vivado executables, to get the timing parameter database.
In some countries that should be legal, as such reverse engineering might become the only way to use the AMD FPGAs that one buys legally.
Software distribution for Linux can be hard. Many distros, different conventions, no FHS is long forgotten, ...
However, Xilinx Vivado and Vitis are so obtusely distributed, making it incredibly hard to package them well.
Three random issues I remember:
1. We had a lot of trouble with Vivado projects randomly breaking. The culprit: German localization combined with automatic clock frequency derivation. Depending on which logic blocks where wired up how, you would get i.e. 99.999 MHz instead of 100 MHz. Apparently, Vivado uses a localized printf (or equivalent) to generate TCL scripts. In German localization, the decimal is a comma, which is interpreted as additional argument in the TCL scripts.
2. For simulation, scripts scripts are copied from a template folder to the user folder, and subsequently adjusted. They are copied in archive mode. If the template is read-only to the current user, so is the new copy, thus failing the subsequent adjustment.
3. If you run the installer with --help as argument, it pops up an X window displaying the help. In general, IIRC, we need to run a headless X just to run the installer in CLI/batch mode.
From a Linux distro maintainer perspective, the packaging is horrible. In particular separation of base installation, configuration, and add-ons is non-existent. Large amount of vendored dependencies, only then to depend on the most minute little packages that Ubuntu supposedly ships.
Setting up a reliable, reproducible CI/CD environment based on Vivado is a large headache.
That all goes to say: if anything, AMD/Xilinx should be paying its customers to deal with this. Unless there is a major improvement in the software distribution practices for Linux, I could not justify to my employer paying money for this experience.
On the other hand, if they commercialize on Linux support, there is soooo much that they can improve by a lot, who knows. Hope dies last and all.
Doesn't help that just to start out you are looking at a 110+ GB size for their tools, which as far as anyone can tell, isn't really justified by anything.
That's because in the EDA space, they have horrible software practices. Take the worst you can imagine and then go worse from there. So eventually, when things "appear to work" they end up taking a snapshot of a messy directory and calling that the deliverable asset.
No, it's just all of the device models. Even the OSS tools take up almost 20 GB of space once you get all of the suppported device models which is not many compared to what Vivado supports.
Why not both? Look at the installables from Cadence, they are full of redundant garbage, broken rpaths, etc. Tools that don't even need to support devices have 5-8GB compressed installables with 12-20GB of on disk space being taken up.
Horribly broken installers and a mess of environment variables needed to get the software to even run.
1) This could actually be an attempt to gain more revenue from big customers that have users who use the free version to test that code can synthesize and run unit tests (by pretending to use smaller parts), and then only use the paid version for the final integration into the actual larger parts.
2) This could give them more customer data more easily. They make no secret of the fact that the free tiers share data with the mothership for product improvement reasons. Maybe they only want to maintain the infrastructure to do this on Windows, or maybe it's harder for customers to subvert on Windows.
3) There will be people running the Windows version on Linux, and explaining how to do it, in 3... 2... 1...
Are the prices so insane this is actually a viable option instead of just buying a bigger license? I always tell juniors to just submit a request for a licence since it will likely cost far less than retraining them or making them work harder and more to compensate for splitting things up (not FPGA related though).
The problem with FPGA builds is that the search space is ginormous, and repeated optimizations are tried in order to, e.g. make it meet the circuit timing requirements.
So, depending on exactly what you are doing it might take many hours to do a full build. And that might soak up all the capacity of a computer. And your Xilinx licenses are either node-locked (so only on that computer) or floating (so, only for one process/user on one computer at a time). You could conceivably have a big computer and timeshare multiple jobs on it, but (a) then you have to have the node-locked license, and (b) no matter what, you'll be slowing down your long job somewhat, by reducing the number of cores and amount of RAM available to it.
So it's definitely worthwhile to have multiple builds of different things going, preferably on different computers.
Organizations that use these sorts of tools typically have a lot of different tools that cost huge bucks compared to Xilinx software (think $100K/seat vs $4K), so this means that (a) they have entire organizations devoted to license management and working hard to ensure that all licenses are reasonably utilized; and (b) the relative cost to them to counteract this move by Xilinx (AMD) and just buy a few more damned Vivado licenses will not really be that high.
Now, do I think this is short-sighted? Yes, probably.
But do I also think that it could be revenue-positive for AMD in the short term? Yes, probably.
Just a random rant: I used to do FPGA work for a living, and I remember Xilinx's ISE (Vivado before they renamed it and the company got bought by AMD) was Windows-only, but the first thing that popped up when starting it was a Cygwin window :D
Well, currently if you want to run the last version of Xilinx ISE 14.7* in Windows, Xilinx will have you download a linux VM to do so (14.7 was originally supported on Windows, but support was dropped after it broke).
On a side note: ISE was discontinued in 2013, but AMD only announced the acquisition in 2020, so I found it strange that those events appear to be linked in your comment?
*ISE is still required for any FPGAs older than 7 (like Virtex/Spartan 6).
Welp, guess I'm glad my grad school project is using a Cyclone FPGA, Intel+Quartus, here I come.
Another casualty of this will be running the tools in docker containers, some folks have made some good templates for them and they greatly simplify deployment/installation.
(I used to prefer the AMD/Xilinx dev setup, but that has been a bit, and using FuseSoC makes moving platforms a lot easier).
There is a ridiculous amount of flagging here. Every comment that says the Linux community gets to show its stuff by doing the work themselves gets flagged. That is no bueno. I've already vouched for several.
Every single of those comments is implicitly saying you should violate the IP rights of the FPGA vendor.
There is no realistic way to build an OSS or FOSS toolchain without reverse engineering Vivado and dumping the trade secrets contained in it 1:1
Even if you build a clean room version of Vivado, you still need the FPGA metadata and clean rooming the metadata for all FPGAs is basically impossible.
Once you understand this, then it sounds incredible dishonest to argue that the Linux community should put in the effort to support a hardware vendor that is hostile to offering their own Linux support when that same company's GPU division had no problem publishing an open source GPU driver for Linux.
Yes. You should dare to violate their IP rights and not put your name on the project. Just port the Windows version to Linux by linking it with winelib.
Extracting trade secrets isn't a violation of anyone's IP rights. Trade secrets are protected against being leaked by employees but they are explicitly not protected against reverse engineering.
It took a small company I worked for months to get new licenses due to AMD just not responding. I'm not sure they have the ability to actually handle this in a timely manner
I wonder if they will come to their senses and revert the decision? It does seem a bit boneheaded to drop Linux support on the Basic tier... What actual reason would they need to do that?
This Anatoli forum moderator looks like to be quite a very bad user representative.
I can understand that they wouldn't reply to the user but the way he replies is aggressive and would motivate me more to insult AMD and co that have a civil exchange.
That being said, it really sucks when companies do such asshole move as forcing you to use windows. Especially because it was not even AMD in the first place but they snatched xilinx and now will try to use the big tech playbook.
This is the absolute dumbest decision imaginable. The only people hurt by the removal of free trial software for Linux are students and amateurs.
Even Apple, possibly the greediest company in the world, knows the importance of cheap hardware and free software for students. Because those students and amateurs eventually become pros who make money decisions.
AMD is always so close to pulling ahead of Intel and Nvidia but somehow manage to shoot themselves in the foot constantly...
I can see American companies quickly loose market dominance to Chinese FPGA manufacturers with this short sighted behavior. People don’t realize how big FPGAs are in Asia.
So obviously none of this is realistic, even the foundations of it don't align with reality, so what point are you trying to make with this comment? I'm afraid it's going over my head.
AMD is acting like French Aristocracy and they’re telling Linux users to eat cake. It’d be nice if there was digital infrastructure and social will to metaphorically take their heads.
Some replies complain about the moderator not answering the main question. While this is a valid complaint, it is also likely that they don't know the answer as well. Now, the best reply would be to openly say that they don't have visibility into upper management's decisions. But, at the same time, I think it's possible that the way they're replying has to do with some internal guidelines on how to handle this sort of questions.
My personal thoughts on this is that EDA tooling is quite expensive to license, and I'm sure many people have jailbroken their Linux versions to avoid paying for the higher tiers, as Linux doesn't have as strong anti-tamper/app sandboxing capabilities as the other 2 big OSes.
Not saying I agree or support this decision, but I can see why they chose to do this, and their set of paying customers is quite different from your average piece of software.
If this were Google, they'd have made the whole backend of it cloud only, and required all customers to upload all data to their servers. Obviously this doesn't fly in a lot of industries FPGAs tend to be used in.
How is it sustainable for AMD to maintain their software on Linux for free? Would you maintain your own Linux software (and its distros) for $0?
I see no problem with monetizing Linux users. If I am monetizing Windows and macOS users, there should be no exceptions towards Linux especially as Linux support is always ill defined (there are hundreds of distros to support and test.)
1: The software is not free. There is what essentially amounts to a free trial. This free trial used to support Windows and Linux. Now the free version only supports Windows, only the paid tiers work on Linux.
2: The software is what amounts to a hardware-specific compiler/IDE. AMD sells the hardware, with healthy margins. Asking "how is it sustainable for AMD to maintain [Vivado] .. for free" is the same as asking, "how is it sustainable for AMD to maintain their OpenGL drivers for free". They have a solid revenue stream from hardware sales that's enabled by the software.
3: Maintaining a free Linux version is close to 0 additional cost. They already need to maintain a free tier because they provide that to Windows, they already need to maintain Linux support because they provide that for the paid tiers. The only extra maintenance would be whatever edge case bugs occur only on the free tier and only when compiled for Linux.
> I see no problem with monetizing Linux users. If I am monetizing Windows and macOS users, there should be no exceptions towards Linux
Here I agree with you - Linux users shouldn't expect any special privileges here. But we're not asking for special treatment, we're asking that we continue to be given the same options as Windows users, just as we were for all previous versions of the software.
What people are objecting to is that for the latest version (and future versions) of the software an existing free tier has been withdrawn from Linux users - and only from Linux users.
First of all, you already pay for the FPGAs, and the only reason why you pay for them is that they are "Field-Programmable" GAs. To be able to use the product that you own, as advertised, you MUST have the AMD software tools, because they refuse to provide the technical documentation that would allow the use of FPGAs without vendor-provided tools.
It is abusive to request an additional big payment in order to use the bought product as intended. This additional payment for the FPGA programming tool is negligible for big companies, which also get great discounts in the price of the FPGAs they buy, but it hurts any small companies and individuals who want to use FPGAs.
These kind of policies never increase in any way the revenue of a company like AMD but they ensure that any market where such policies are frequent become dominated by a few quasi-monopolies, instead of having a healthy competition that keeps prices low for computers, as it existed in electronics until around a quarter of century ago.
Their FPGA development software is not an independent product, but it is a part of the FPGAs they are selling, like the boxes in which such FPGAs are packaged.
Your claim that they get $0 for their software is as ridiculous as the claim that Intel can no longer sell boxed CPUs, because they get $0 for the cardboard and plastic packages of their CPUs.
For now, only the Linux version of the FPGA tools has been discontinued, the free and worse Windows version still exists, so what you say in the last version of your comment is still wrong, because the Windows users are not monetized, yet.
You'd think removing friction on the software side for someone who already bought their hardware would be in their interest. Especially for students and hobbyists, who will want use what they already know once they enter the industry.
How is is sustainable for Apple to maintain MacOS for free? I see not problem with monetizing Mac users by making them pay extra for OS and especially its upgrades.
The official replies are addressing questions that nobody has asked. The main issue is why Linux support is being removed from the Basic tier while Windows is still allowed.
To grow the ecosystem, AMD needs more people working on their hardware. Restricting Linux will only alienates students, hobbyists, and devs who want to adopt AMD tech.
- From long term AMD user
The official replies started off by addressing ... the "unacceptable abusive behavior towards AMD". The most important thing here is obviously to ask people not to use such hurtful words as "disgraceful" towards poor little AMD...
Answering the actual question seems not a high priority
Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset? Especially when to company has just announced changes that limit what users can do with their products.
The older I get the less I want to deal with companies that act like primadonnas and the technologies they make. This is also why I don’t do phone apps: your market access is 100% controlled by two companies that can wipe out your business overnight.
Imagine having to work with these people professionally. With real money involved. While probably not as high risk as mobile development, their customer representatives seem like real primadonnas. You’ll be happier without these people in your life.
> Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset?
I’m actually fully in favor of empowering customer-facing representatives to put reasonable limits on responding to customer abuse.
It should not be the job of a forum moderator to take abuse. Warning them about the rules of the forum and then enforcing the rules is forum management 101. It’s getting silly that people are attacking this person specifically for just doing their job.
> I’m actually fully in favor of empowering customer-facing representatives to put reasonable limits on responding to customer abuse.
That's not the question that was asked.
Neither calling a company's actions disgraceful nor anything else in the posts that triggered that official reply were abusive to customer service.
I actually support companies who empower their customer facing employees to enforce civility.
It means the company cares more about their employees than sacrificing them in favor of maybe getting a few more sales from angry customers.
There were no uncivil comments in the whole thread.
Also, corporations don’t have feelings. They aren’t people. They are legal structures. No comments made were directed at moderators or employees.
Whether it's directed at you or not, as an employee it's still stressful AF and these people are like getting paid kinda shit wages to put up with people all day long.
I'm not arguing about whether or not this particular instance contained "uncivil comments" (do the mods have the ability there to delete the comments if they are uncivil?)...
But day in day out, on a mass level, it's such a goddamned drag, even if it isn't directed at you, it's energy and emotional bullshit. Every job has it, sometimes it's your boss or shit coworkers... But customer facing is such an awful position for the wages they usually make. Even if it's "good" wages. Even if they don't primarily face the public, but still have to engage in a secondary support role. I can't imagine what it's like to deal with this as a job when you're on the front line with an angry mob coming at you.
Again on this particular case I'm making no judgement, but it IS a stressor, regardless if directed at you, or not.
Especially in a high volume environment that probably has more incoming vectors of commentary/attack/vitriol than just the single comment thread.
If you want my opinion I think what these mods said had nothing to do with the stress of the environment, they’re just following something of a community moderator trope where they maybe aren’t even employees and at all but enjoy the authority of moderation.
They have no authority or knowledge of the topic at hand at all but can’t resist weighing in and throwing authority around.
> Whether it's directed at you or not, as an employee it's still stressful AF and these people are like getting paid kinda shit wages to put up with people all day long.
Then don't take the job.
Not everyone has the luxury you do.
Can you imagine if everyone who had to put up with this bullshit for shit wages, did what you said. Good luck with services.
The people that take those jobs usually don't find them extremely stressful.
When you're including all the jobs with bad pay, the average person has a reasonable variety of options that are all flawed in different ways.
You know, it used to be "The customer is always right".
But it's become "Whaat? Are you talking to us you uncivilized, stinky hippy peons? How dare you? We serve only the rich corps now, we don't care about you or your money."
> But customer facing is such an awful position for the wages they usually make.
So you're saying that rich AMD doesn't pay their employees enough and for this reason, their unsatisfied customers should be careful not to say bad things about the company to the employees mistreated by that same company... There are too many logical errors here to describe in a short comment.
I matters taste, the customer is always right.
be more resilient.
end of story.
I disagree that enforcing civility means that, especially if mkru's comments are considered too uncivil.
They were very sweary.
Nothing about swearing inherently constitutes abuse.
Tone policing is a common distraction from addressing the point and a useful diversion from making unflattering admissions.
When a company screws over entire segments of their customers people get angry. And they don’t get less angry when their frustration is belittled by someone how essentially says “your dissatisfaction means less to us than the words you choose to describe it”.
_Professionals_ de-escalate. This was not that.
I don’t want to register for this forum and I’m having trouble finding any kind of a sort. But are you referring to this comment?
* First, any bad language or abusive behaviour towards AMD, is not acceptable. If continued, we will proceed to block your profiles altogether.
If you are not happy with the new tier licensing flow, no one is stopping users (Students etc) to continue using the current versions of Vivado (any Vivado version prior 2026.1) and develop using free Vivado ML Standard Edition.*
If so, I have a different take on this. It could have been worded better, but I don’t think Anatoli is a native English speaker. Based upon a reply to @mkru, I also don’t think they have much visibility into marketing or if they do, they’re not very interested.
* For your specific question: Why is Linux not supported in the BASIC tier?
This is AMD's marketing decision.*
None of this is great, but English isn’t the easiest language to learn and de-escalation involves a specific speech pattern. And of everything they said in the answers I’ve found, ‘this is AMD’s marketing decision’ is the most blunt. Everything else has more information attached except for the little takedown at the beginning.
I know that’s a lot of words to say that I think belittling is a little strong. But brevity is a juicy topic… :)
Communication is tricky because it isn’t just about the words, but how they land. On the surface it may not seem like belittling someone’s pain. In reality this is exactly what it feels like for those on the receiving end. It also doesn’t help that it was delivered with a threat of expulsion. It communicates:
- we don’t care about your pain - those in charge find it below their dignity to explain the decision to you - we don’t feel we owe you an explanation, but we’ll take your license fees - we care more about how you say things than what you say - you are helpless and we can take away your voice (here) if we want to
Now, the problem isn’t just that some people are not native English speakers — quite a few in our industry come across as not being able to “speak human”. Which makes us prone to put more emphasis on words than how different people in different states of mind read those words.
> Communication is tricky because it isn’t just about the words, but how they land
Please mind that English is not my native language, but as I aged, I found that to be true less and less. Exact word choice does not matter as long as the intent is conveyed properly. With some leeway, maybe benefit of the doubt. And misunderstandings can be cleared up.
In this case, customers are unhappy with the decision. No amount of weaseling around with any kind of word combination is not changing the decision. Whatever tone he might have used here would not help anyone or clear up anything. There is no further misunderstanding.
People can be abused, corporations can't. They aren't living things.
> Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset
Typical phone CSR boilover from covid days. Most places I call these days have a message saying that they will hang up on you if you act pissy.
> have a message saying that they will hang up on you if you act pissy.
When I had some influence over customer support at a company once I set a similar expectation. We didn’t advertise it up front but if a customer was being abusive over support channels they could be cut off.
Big morale boost for customer support. Abusive customers are rare but they can think it’s their job to attack, threaten, and be uncivil. Being stuck in a position where you’re forced to placate angry man-children sucks.
It’s sad that there are so many comments here trying to attack the forum moderator for moderating the forum.
This person had no hand in the decision making. No reason to treat them as an outlet for anger.
If customer support employees don't want to deal with angry customers they should take a job whose purpose is not dealing with unhappy customers. If you as a company have too many angry customers the response should be to fix your product/service, not to find excuses to ignore those customers.
All you're doing to forcing your customers to find other ways to fix their problems - either by finding someone higher paid than customer support and wasting their time instead or by going to a competitor and telling everyone to do the same.
Was the anger directed at the moderator?
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Seems we have an awful lot of snowflakes in the corporate tech world the last couple years. Can’t take criticism, can’t handle basic questioning of their operation …
That is why techbros cannot make it in politics. I was actually impressed with Zuckerberg: he knows how to wear a suit and did not crumble when EU parliamentarians questioned him.
not sure why you're downvot... yes i do.
You raise an important topic.
Way too many people not going through initiation of adult hood, leaning into their grandiose inner thoughts.
Some people, including the management of most big corporations, claim that verbal insults, which do no actual physical harm to anyone, are "unacceptable abusive behavior", while the actions that do physical harm to others, e.g. by tricking or forcing them to pay an extra part of their hard-earned money for things that should not have been paid, because they had already been paid in another form, instead of using that money for worthy purposes, are not "unacceptable abusive behavior".
Obviously, I believe that a decision like that made by AMD now is a much more "unacceptable abusive behavior" than any kind of verbal insult ever known to mankind.
This kind of decision is a masked price rise of the AMD FPGAs that applies only to small businesses and individuals, while the big quasi-monopolistic companies are not affected, which will make competing with them even more difficult.
What annoys me most about this kind of policies aimed to hurt small businesses and individuals and favor big companies, which have become more and more frequent, is that in most cases they do not provide any financial benefit whatsoever to the company that enacts them, because they limit competition not in the market where that company activates, but in related markets.
However such policies are very beneficial for the entire class of people who are major shareholders, board members or executives in big companies, by ensuring that all markets are eventually dominated by few, which has happened especially after the end of the nineties of the past century, resulting in the current unhealthy economies of the Western countries and especially of USA.
This success of the quasi-monopolies has been caused by the lack of truly adequate consumer protection laws.
I agree with your point (that AMD does a lot more harm than what they are indignant about) but not the way you go there. If emotional abusive behavior is not "physical harm" because it's just emotions, then financial abusive behavior is not "physical harm" either because it's just numbers. When you consider what incredible harm being emotionally unwell can lead to, I don't think it deserves to be dismissed.
AMD is clearly just putting on a performance here though, using the backlash they get as a weapon.
Yea insulting and being verbally abusive towards individuals is something that it's worth taking action against. My problem with AMD's response is simply that they take issue with "bad language or abusive behavior towards AMD".
NGL that phrase reads as an "ESL-ism" where the intended phrasing is "towards AMD moderators/employees/whatever" i.e. "Don't be a dick to the people trying to help/answer questions" not "don't be mean to the company".
Other quirks with their writing style seem to lend support to this being an "ESL-ism" as well.
It would be more accurate to say that what AMD is doing is causing material harm, while a few mean words directed towards an anonymous megacorp are not.
The replies here are horrifying. Yes corporations are not people. But they are made up of people. I'd imagine most here work in them yourselves. Often less well paid support staff who have to read, and try to respond, to such terrible behavior. As one of those support people myself I can assure you it takes a toll.
Do you genuinely think that support staff reads "this decision made by AMD is disgraceful" and feel personally attacked because they identify as "part of AMD" and therefore an attack on AMD's honor is an attack on theirs?
Don't get me wrong, support staff often gets abuse thrown their way in a way that is absolutely not okay. There's a lot of people out there who get angry at the support personale. That's not what we're talking about here. Support staff needs thick enough skin to hear, "AMD did something bad" and not take it personally.
The entire point of support staff is to stand between unhappy customers and the rest of the company. If they don't think their pay reflects the responsibilities that that entails then they should ask for a raise, not make excuses to ignore customers that the company has failed to serve.
Its just numbers only for rich. For poor ir can be the differnce between employability and not. In general, I believe that non-free tools like this are effective violence against poor nations since they trap those societies in unskilled sectors.
Poor nations just pirate.
AMD is not a person. It has no emotions. Any perceived emotional harm by humans is them projecting themselves onto the AMD entity. Whereas AMDs actions here cause real harm to individuals.
AMD and any other corpo is made of people, who do have emotions. Abuse towards these people impacts corp operations. This is an entity protecting itself from damage that it feels is not worth the benefit the offering would bring.
And I question your assertion of real harm to individuals, by not offering free support, being worse than receiving verbal abuse.
Right, but saying "this policy change is disgraceful" and saying "you, customer support person, are an insufferable dickhead" are very different things. From what I can see in the link comments, people seem to be saying mostly the former.
Was the abuse and response directed at a person or AMD? Even AMDs response is vague and deflects it as “Abuse towards AMD”
AMD is free to change their terms of their product, but then characterizing the backlash as abuse towards AMD is laughable. Have empathy for people not corporations
> claim that verbal insults, which do no actual physical harm to anyone, are "unacceptable abusive behavior"
Which is true in a vacuum. Insulting _people_ is abusive behavior and shouldn't be accepted.
The issue here is the posts aren't insulting people, they're insulting a company, and a company can't be mentally abused.
There are still individuals, who make up the company, who have to read and try to formulate responses to said abusive behavior. It's usually the lower paid support staff not the engineers or C suite who have those duties. As one of those people I can confirm it absolutely takes a toll.
Nah, feel free to insult any company I have worked for or even the company that I am one of the founders of. I don't see why that should be off limits. But do not insult me as a person.
I'll come your place of work and hurl abuse at you all day. Let's see if you find it harmful or not by the end of the week.
> Answering the actual question seems not a high priority
This is a clear sign of propaganda and bullshitting by them. Because answering the actual question would be easy, unless you deliberately want to harass linux users. Perhaps a Barbara Streisand effect kicks in, because people are now sharpening their ears and eyes as to why they harass linux users specifically.
I also have to admit that while my main operating system is linux, on my left side I have a windows computer too. I found this approach more practical, even though I think Linux is far superior to windows. This abuse by private entities to try to force everyone to use winows, is anonying to no ends though.
Yeah that was hilarious, pretty much instantly closed the tab when I read that.
Oh please mister, won't you please think of the little billion dollar corporation's feelings? They're only poor corporations with nothing to their names but their billion dollar businesses! Won't you think of the starving corporations?!
Probably a good thing I don't run a company, because I wouldn't put energy into responding to the kind of comments they're addressing. If you use a support channel the same way a teenager uses Reddit, you should count to ten and try again later.
That said, the tone and basic grammar of AMD's support rep isn't what I would've expected either.
They did answer the question, though:
> AMD expectation is that the BASIC tier licensing level is used for simple, entry‑level needs. While more advanced, production-based workflows are aligned with paid tiers.
In other words, they're saying hobbyists and beginners are on Windows anyway, and students can get a free version if they apply through the right channels. No more freebies.
AMD wants people to pay for their software. Instead of going "why are you bullying Linux users", AMD customers should probably be going "thank god the Windows version is still free (for now)"
You're kind of doing the job for them here by inventing a connection between Linux and "simple, entry-level needs". Plenty of Linux users have "simple, entry-level needs"; nothing about using Windows automatically makes you needs simpler. If that is indeed their argument, they ought to have spelled it out.
> In other words, they're saying hobbyists and beginners are on Windows anyway
I suspect they're massively underestimating how many hobbyists and students are on Linux. We're not talking about a typical demographic here, we're talking about people interested in computers and technology at precisely the level that Windows and MacOS aim to isolate from the user.
"Well, some guy in marketing figured that we could make more money by charging more money, especially for things that we didn't previously charge money for. This was validated by ChatGPT as the kind of brilliant insight that qualifies someone for an MBA. You may take some solace in the fact that we somehow managed to preserve a free version for broke idiots who use Windows."
I don't know anything about this situation, but basic logic says if you want someone to give you free stuff, be nice to them.
It wouldn't surprise me if AMD is scaling back their free offerings due to the impact on support.
> It wouldn't surprise me if AMD is scaling back their free offerings due to the impact on support.
They’re welcome to hamstring themselves in the market; it’s just not a smart move.
Who are the alternatives to Xilinx on the high end currently? Altera? Lattice and the others make comparatively small FPGAs IIRC.
Those students and hobbyists often end up in jobs where they are involved in multi million dollar purchasing decisions.
AMD’s MBA types extinguish that early mindshare at their own peril.
MBAs are mercenaries, that's part of their formation. They fully expect to be working somewhere else when things start looking bad.
They are just doing what mercenaries have been doing for millennia : cost a lot in peace time, loot the population, and run away or cut a deal with the invader when the goings get though.
A good example is the Russian "Africa Corp" in Mali. Expensive, atrocities against the population and cut a deal with the jihadist to run away when they came last month.
Yeah this is such an own goal. You want students using your code to get them to use it in job. They have learnt nothing from cuda
They still have a system for sponsoring students (through professors). They're not entirely crazy.
It does make me wonder how much money they must be losing on these chips that they've turned this desperate for licensing costs.
Yes, but that’s resistance for potential users they can’t afford if they ever want adoption on the level of CUDA.
Usually it's just some idiot manager trying to juice quarterly numbers and get promoted. Then they jump to another company and the damage takes years to kick in.
They have learnt... very slightly more than nothing from CUDA.
When they do not have any justifiable answer, or don't want to answer, but need to keep the facade on, they'll sidestep and tell you how hard they are working on something, and how many unrelated things they've archived.
- A regular tactic used by our former autocratic ruler, or most corrupted people
> For your specific question: Why is Linux not supported in the BASIC tier?
> This is AMD's marketing decision.
> Kind Regards,
> Anatoli Curran,
> Xilinx/AMD Forum Moderator
I mean, nobody in that forum necessarily knows why. It just came from above.
I think many haven't read that part, as it is hidden by default and one have to expand the answer to see it. At least that was what happened to me... I didn't noticed it until you pointed it out.
One would've thought they had learned from their supposed driver superiority over Nvidia due to embracing Linux users with OSS drivers
I guess FPGA division (nee Xilinx, which was always a bit sketchy, even if they had best silicon) doesn't learn much from the GPU division.
I don't think AMD can say this but I think the reality is for most hobbyists this is the prevailing attitude:
"The Harsh Truth about FPGAs (You Should Avoid Them?!)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3d8uFKsJiY
a.k.a. Just use a microcontroller. And for the vast majority of hobby projects I suspect that is good advice. Low end FPGAs don't compete well with low end microcontrollers and more people know how to use microcontrollers.
Universities are fine as they can sign up for the University Program and get the licensees they used to get. https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/university-program.html
I think the reality is the niche that FPGAs occupied is getting hit hard on the high and low end. Cheap Chinese FPGAs are prevalent, cheap microcontrollers more so, and on the high-end making an ASIC that compete with a high-end FPGA has never been cheaper, and is getting cheaper and easier everyday. 65-28nm is very easy to use now (relatively speaking) and is very low cost with tons of tape outs and there is good competition. Beating an FPGA with an ASIC is not all that hard. Grad students at CMU, Stanford, Georgia Tech, etc. do it all the time in their tape-out class. Making an ASIC is not as easy as an FPGA for sure, especially if you need DDR and serdes. And NRE for ASICs for small volume ( <1K units) is higher. But it is getting easier and cheaper everyday. And it's now feasible for small teams (say ~6) to do it. I think they need to look very hard at where they spend their NRE now to stay relevant and they need to start getting brutal because I am sure the amount of revenue they're bringing in is under serious attack.
As to why Windows and not Linux? It's probably cheaper for them to maintain Windows for one reason or another. Maybe they don't even do it an just contract it out and Windows contractors are easier to find, but I'll bet it's just a basic cost issue at the end of the day.
Are you seriously suggesting hobbyists should tapeout an ASIC instead of use an FPGA?
1. For one-off designs (quantity=1) ASICs will never beat a high end FPGA on unit price.
2. As a hobbyist, you want to EXPERIMENT. You cannot do that with an ASIC. Hobbyists want to do something simple, test it on real hardware, and slowly build up from that. I don't have the time nor expertise nor motivation to spend months writing verification to get it right the first time for a tapeout.
"Just use a microcontroller"... I will concede that microcontrollers do cover 90% of hobbyists use cases (that number increasing by the day). But for hobbyists sometimes you want to learn HDL or digital logic or computer engineering. You can do this hands on with a FPGA much more effectively than in software.
> It's probably cheaper for them to maintain Windows for one reason or another.
They already need to maintain the Linux build for all the other paid tiers?? These are the same software with different features locked behind a license key. It costs them NOTHING to keep the build enabled for free tier.
> Are you seriously suggesting hobbyists should tapeout an ASIC instead of use an FPGA?
No. I said the low-end of FPGA sales is getting eaten by microcontrollers and the high-end of FPGAs sales is probably about to get eaten by custom ASICs.
Although the cost of making an ASIC is high, in the larger nodes it's not that high, and getting ever cheaper at FPGA performance levels and logic densities. FPGAs are terribly inefficient with their HW they're very easy to beat with an ASIC. They only get away with it because the NRE today is lower. But it's not an order of magnitude lower and I'm not sure how much longer that will be the case in nodes at 28nm and larger based on what I know Universities pay in tape-out classes.
Will there be very low qty projects where the NRE of developing an ASIC overwhelms that of an ASIC, sure. But will there be enough business in that niche to sustain the business of AMD, Intel and Lattice? Not obvious.
And I don't think the FPGA hobbyist market of people who "want to learn HDL" spends enough money to affect what's coming and this decision from AMD reflects that.
> 1. For one-off designs (quantity=1) ASICs will never beat a high end FPGA on unit price.
Never say never. These guys were able to convince investors you're wrong about that. :)
https://atomicsemi.com
P.S. If you're a hobbyist who wants to make an ASIC... https://www.tinytapeout.com
> No. I said the low-end of FPGA sales is getting eaten by microcontrollers and the high-end of FPGAs sales is probably about to get eaten by custom ASICs.
You have absolutely no idea what an ASIC costs compared to a FPGA. A FPGA that can compete with a tinytapeout chip costs a few dollars at most in extremely low quantites. Something high performance would need probably TSMC 12nm or similar at a minimum. At that point, you're talking $1M+ between licensing fees and direct costs to just go on a shuttle. If you want to make your own higher volume run or can't wait for shuttle spot, you're looking easily $5-10M minimum for your first 6 wafers. Comparatively, FPGAs competitive with TSMC 12nm run from a few hundred dollars up to several thousand dollars each. So for low volume, they're very competitive.
Are you sure you actually know what you're talking about?
FPGA unit costs keep doing down and they usually tend to use a recent manufacturing process. Meanwhile the fixed NRE costs of ASICs keep going up the more advanced the manufacturing process is.
An FPGA consists of non programmable logic components such as DSPs, block RAM, NoCs, SERDES/configurable IO, that keep scaling with the manufacturing process.
If you try to replicate this with an older process to cut costs, you will have an area and energy efficiency penalty.
This means that FPGAs have become more relevant over time.
I'm not sure it's quite as clean cut as you say. FPGA's have a 10x penalty in area due to the extra routing wires they need.
Also, it seems like the node that Xilinx has been using lately (28 nm) isn't as cutting edge as it used to be.
> Just use a microcontroller. And for the vast majority of hobby projects I suspect that is good advice.
I recently bought a hobby FPGA kit because I think the Von Neumann model is a beautiful innovation and I want to learn more about doing useful computation tasks from the lowest level logical components. I've always been interested in computers, but when I was in grade school the only useful computers I could afford were discarded PCs that I brought back to life with Linux distros. I now have a fulfilling career as a direct result of access to cheap hardware and open-source software when I had much more time and much less money than I do now. Decisions like AMD's are a long-term negative for the industry.
But amd doesn't need you, all they care about is ai. https://youtu.be/uJcf2UGCH1w
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What you say is ridiculous.
The only reason why the "Linux community" cannot create adequate FPGA design tools is that the vendors like AMD refuse to document the necessary details of their products.
A few old AMD FPGAs have been reversed engineered, e.g. some ARTIX-7, so for them there is no need for the rather bad AMD tools, but for most AMD formerly Xilinx FPGAs it is impossible to create better tools for lack of documentation.
As long as AMD refuses to provide the technical documentation required to use their products, it should have been a legal obligation to at least provide basic tools that allows the buyer of such products to actually use "FPGAs", i.e. to "field-program" them, as the name of the sold product claims.
Like many other FPGA developers, I could write myself better FPGA development tools than what AMD provides, if I had access to the complete FPGA technical documentation to which only a few big companies have access, a restriction whose only possible purpose is to prevent competition in the FPGA market.
If AMD had documented the exact format of the bit stream required to program each model of their FPGAs and the complete timing consequences of each synthesis choice, nobody would need any FPGA simulation or synthesis tool provided by AMD in Vivado.
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No, it's not "on the Linux community" to bribe a company out of releasing hardware in a broken state of usability.
It's no more a bribe than having to pay money to buy the latest C++ standard when implementing a C++ compiler. The reality is that companies pay each other for partnerships all of the time. There is value to AMD for keeping this documentation secret and there is value for having control over what design tools exist for them. It makes sense that AMD would want to be compensated in this case and would not want to do work for free which could undermine their business.
The hardware is not in a broken state of usability since you can still buy usable design software.
> It's no more a bribe than having to pay money to buy the latest C++ standard when implementing a C++ compiler.
The C++ standard group didn't just sell me a piece of hardware that only runs C++, in a world where no free C++ compilers exist.
That analogy isn't even close.
> There is value to AMD for keeping this documentation secret
It's a value that doesn't deserve respect.
> It makes sense that AMD would want to be compensated in this case and would not want to do work for free which could undermine their business.
Their business is selling the hardware. Their money should come from selling the hardware.
I'm not demanding a free full-featured development environment. I think they should have to document the hardware and maybe provide a basic compiler. If they want to sell something beyond that, no problem.
> The hardware is not in a broken state of usability since you can still buy usable design software.
And if you don't?
It's a fixable broken state with enough money, but it's still a broken state.
>That analogy isn't even close.
Then how about the instruction manuals for the processors themselves. It's really not that different. People spend a lot of time and resources building something and compiling information and you are demanding to get it for free.
>It's a value that doesn't deserve respect.
It does deserve respect as a lot of people put in work in creating it and creating a successful product. If you think it's not that much effort to do then find someone to make their own FPGA and documentation for it.
>Their business is selling the hardware. Their money should come from selling the hardware.
It is rare for a business to be so 1 dimensional. Businesses have many income streams. Even for the same product. Take for example the iPhone. Apple gets income from people buying the device. Income from companies for letting them sell things in the App Store. Income from Google for setting Google as the default search provider.
>And if you don't?
If you refuse to get a compatible computer for the free software to flash the chips then you can't flash the chips for free. The chips are still fully functional and if you sold them to someone else they could program them.
> Then how about the instruction manuals for the processors themselves.
Those should come with the processor.
> People spend a lot of time and resources building something and compiling information and you are demanding to get it for free.
Documentation for a product should always be "free" when you buy that product.
Which is far from being "free" in the normal sense of the word.
> It does deserve respect as a lot of people put in work in creating it and creating a successful product. If you think it's not that much effort to do then find someone to make their own FPGA and documentation for it.
I respect the effort. I don't respect the competitive advantage gained by withholding documentation.
Was my meaning that unclear? I quoted the exact thing I don't respect.
> It is rare for a business to be so 1 dimensional. Businesses have many income streams. Even for the same product. Take for example the iPhone. Apple gets income from people buying the device. Income from companies for letting them sell things in the App Store. Income from Google for setting Google as the default search provider.
Some of those streams are more acceptable than others. Apple's income from Google is fine. Their income from the App Store would be fine if it wasn't mandatory, and is much less fine when it is mandatory. Paid documentation is pretty far into bad territory.
> If you refuse to get a compatible computer for the free software to flash the chips then you can't flash the chips for free. The chips are still fully functional and if you sold them to someone else they could program them.
In this case you can get Windows.
What if they stopped having the free Windows version either? Because the way you're talking about this situation it sounds like you would also call that acceptable.
>Those should come with the processor.
They are useless for most people who buy the processor, even transitively. For people who will get called out of it, it makes sense to let companies charge for that value.
>Documentation for a product should always be "free" when you buy that product.
I feel this viewpoint does not value the work it takes to compile all of this information. Nor does it acknowledge how full documentation could reveal sensitive information. There is no reason for consumers to need to know how microcode instructions work since they will never be able to properly sign a microcode update. People will always like getting valuable stuff for free so you can't justify something by looking at how happy people are by getting value for free.
This also gets into a potential slippery slope where things like schematics or repair information, or even source code is forced to be given away for free. Confidential IP is a common part of many businesses and offers a tangible competitive advantage.
>I don't respect the competitive advantage gained by withholding documentation. Was my meaning that unclear?
What I was implying is that by forcing people to give up their hard work for free you are calling their work worthless. Finding innovative ways to make a product better deserves to be rewarded.
>Because the way you're talking about this situation it sounds like you would also call that acceptable.
I do think it's acceptable. I also think it's acceptable for them to charge money to sell you a programmer to use with the chip too. I don't think they have to give you the physical hardware to flash it with every chip they send you.
I'm not at all calling it worthless. It's very valuable. But I think it's a value that every owner deserves access to. And for IP licensing? If it's mandatory companies will figure it out.
If your competitive advantage needs you to not even release documentation, does it really? Really? Well the societal benefits are more important, sorry.
And it's still not giving up work for free. It's telling companies to sell these two things together.
A physical programmer is different because those have a marginal cost.
>Then how about the instruction manuals for the processors themselves. It's really not that different. People spend a lot of time and resources building something and compiling information and you are demanding to get it for free.
x86_64 processors maintain backwards compatibility. This means you can reverse engineer one chip and then have your software work on a different processor from a different company.
FPGAs don't even retain compatibility between different sizes of the same base model. If you reverse engineer one chip that's only one chip.
>It does deserve respect as a lot of people put in work in creating it and creating a successful product. If you think it's not that much effort to do then find someone to make their own FPGA and documentation for it.
I'm not sure why companies and online forum people defending the company are so obsessed with making their products less valuable, driving away customers and making less money in the long run. The financial incentives point exactly in the opposite direction.
>It is rare for a business to be so 1 dimensional. Businesses have many income streams
Why does it matter if it is rare? The only thing that matters is that you're making money. Why do I have to explain this?
Nvidia obtained a 5 trillion market by selling the hardware and giving the software to program and run on it away for free. Why do you hate it when AMD makes money?
What kind of logic is this?
Linux developers are supposed to build their own software and to do so they have to pay AMD for documentation under an NDA that prevents them from developing an open source toolchain?
What kind of logic is that? This is especially stupid since AMD benefits from every single FPGA sale so all they did was reduce the number of FPGAs they will sell, by locking out customers.
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> Reverse engineering tools are pretty good these days.
The problem is not the technological knowledge, but the legally complicated situation.
Rule of thumb: if you are looking for an evil in the world, it's usually written down in the laws.
You can just do it. They can't catch you. Don't put your real name on the project, and for extra paranoia, use a VPN, and you're fine.
Most things worth doing are illegal, like founding Uber.
Because most don't want to work on something big, with a high risk of being sued into oblivion once released?
It's a pretty low risk if you don't put your identity out there. I know there's at least one Git forge that's a Tor onion service. Even on GitHub 99% of the time this ends with a DMCA takedown of the repository. You should probably put it on a pseudonymous alt account but you don't actually need to use a Tor onion service.
You could also get someone else to put their name on the web hosting and so on. Don't know who exactly, but there are a lot more people willing to take legal risk of having reverse-engineered an FPGA toolchain, than people who can reverse-engineer an FPGA toolchain. Doing the work is what's most important, and the rest can be figured out later. But you don't even see that. You don't see people being like "I reverse-engineered Vivado but I won't give you a copy because I could get sued."
"Doing the work is what's most important, and the rest can be figured out later."
I would say for most people his means they won't start the work if they don't know whether there is a way. Also most people like to get credit for their work. So the number of people capable AND willing to work without getting credit is low. And that is not surprising to me.
It is not my skill set, but I certainly would not invest much into something like this.
> You don't see people being like "I reverse-engineered Vivado but I won't give you a copy because I could get sued."
Eh, not Vivado, but back in my undergrad days I RE/cracked a tool used in a very specific niche and definitely kept my mouth shut as the developers could a) do some investigation and then sue me, a student without any legal budget to spare; b) improve copy protection on future releases; and/or c) prevent my access to future versions of the tool that I was using for my thesis.
On other threads about Denuvo you always see somebody saying they've got the chops but the risk to their livelihoods is not worth it.
I think there are a lot of (now) hobbyist reverse-engineers that learned the craft back in the day and kept the knowledge for themselves.
Case in point: People who downvote my comment instead of reverse engineering Vivado are actually proving it correct.
Vivado already supports Linux, the development is supported by very large customers that put FPGAs in cars, [REDACTED], and other kinds of objects that crash into other objects.
This is just hurting students and hobbyists.
And, since there's a pipeline from students and hobbyists to professional use, it's risking the future.
AMD has been unable to not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for ages. I'd almost say someone high up is getting kickbacks from their competitors.
Schools can join the AMD University Program and get back to where they were, and more. https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/university-program.html
As for hobbyists, in the world of $0.03 microcontrollers, strong competition on the low end from Chinese manufacturers, and where few people learn HDLs, is NRE money in the hobby market really money well spent?
I'm a HW designer and even I use microcontrollers now for most things, but not everything, because it's usually cheaper and faster.
With semiconductor prices coming down as far as they have I think the world has probably fundamentally changed for FPGAs and the niche they occupied is shrinking fast.
And hurting AMD.
Nah. Why do Windows users get it for free while I have to pay because I'm an "advanced" user?
I'm not rewarding that. I'll reward companies like Valve instead.
This tier of the tool is free on Windows.
It might be a fair criticism that Linux users don't pay for software, but being a dick about it isn't going to get you anywhere.
(It's weird to see people on HN shilling for AMD against Linux, though. Very astroturf flavored)
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The notion of being expected to pay for software that was formerly free - when Windows users aren't expected to bear those same costs - does indeed piss me off.
If I were actually using Xilinx FPGAs I'd be more pissed off. Luckily the projects that interest me currently are based around Intel, Lattice and Gowin devices.
More like the notion of seeing different treatment between OSes. No one likes being punished for a choice that shouldn't be any of the selling party's business. That's especially true in the Linux community, which was the target of Microsoft's anticompetitive policies for decades.
That's just like when macOS users got mad when they learned they were targeted by marketing schemes to sell them more expensive stuff [1].
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2012/06/26/155792590/orbitz-targets-mac-...
Maintaining software on Linux just takes more time and effort - due to less stability and number of distros.
AMD does maintain Linux anyway, for their paid tiers. It's not like they're saving money by dumping the free tier for Linux.
AMD is making more than enough money from hardware sales to fund the software that actually makes is usable.
Even Apple doesn't charge you for the software needed to actually be able to use their devices (well since around Snow Leopard or so, at least).
But I suppose the idea of not being as greedy as possible really "pisses off" AMD's executives (and presumably some of the people shilling for them here).
And presumably you didn't read the article since AMD will continue to support this on Linux anyway.
I get what you're saying but I can understand the frustration here. Vivado licenses start at $1200/year or $5000 for a perpetual license.. Just to use software to work with hardware that you already paid for. And it's not like they are dropping support for Linux altogether, it would cost them nothing to continue supporting Linux in the free tier.
It just seems like a weird decision on AMD's part.
I’ve spent several hundred thousand on Xilinx FPGAs yet they nickel and dime me for licenses. It’s not the cost that’s a problem—-it’s the hassle of making a PO for a license to set up new computers, set up CI, hiring new teammates, setting up for interns/students. Xilinx has continued to go downhill since their acquisition by AMD.. it used to feel like it was run by engineers who understood their customers, now it seems to be getting taken over by the MBA crowd who only understands pinching pennies and chiseling their own loyal customers
Tbh, I think they should just charge for the chips and keep the software free.
Yep. Strategy Letter V by Joel Spolsky (2002): "Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements". Also, from the 2004's "How Microsoft Lost the API War":
Similar logic applies to selling FPGAs.Although it also means Windows could rely on Intel so long for compiler tools, that when I was trying to build for ARM customers, I realized a lot of the expected developer tools are just barely functional or don’t exist (ifort, MKL, gdb, mingw, etc)
Similarly, AMD wonders why they can't have a bigger piece of that sweet GPU market. Maybe Nvidia is worth 5 trillion because they have a deep ecosystem (CUDA) and community and there's certainly not charging or impeding developers from using it, charging only for the hardware.
This x10000
I can get parts, they're part of a BOM that gets approved, but getting POs approved for software is a pain in the ass. Been considering switching next gen stuff to microchip.
This is one reason why I see companies like Gowin winning the game in the long run.
Microchip also wants money for license to their design suite.
The parts were considering are available under their free tier IIRC
About 25 years ago I did some work on Xilinx FPGAs. The hardware was nice. The ability to get them free (as a business development strategy) as a research user was nice [0]. The quality of the software stack was awful. The FPGAs were getting big enough that the synthesis process could need more 4GB of user memory, but the tools were barely functional on 64-bit systems of any sort, and this was far from the only problem.
It’s too bad that a vendor with only slightly worse hardware hasn’t eaten Xilinx’s lunch by having a genuinely pleasant development process. These companies aren’t selling synthesis tools — they’re selling hardware. Make the developers want to use it! (Intel, for all their faults, understands this.)
[0] It takes a special sort of incompetence to take 5 figures worth of fancy chips, stick them in a poorly packaged box, write only part of the address in it, and hope that FedEx will deliver it somewhere useful.
Xilinx has often thought of the software as the special sauce that sets them apart it seems like.
At this point its a net negative. Nothing like a massive bloated Vivado that now requires a slow spywareOS to run its rotting carcass of gigabytes (100's) of java.
About the only good thing Vivado does is fail to synthesize correctly... oh wait that's a mystery bug that I and many others have run into. And impossible to understand why.
FPGA tooling desperately needs open source tooling like C needed GCC.
We've had good experiences with Lattice parts. Their software tools are free for all of their basic chips. They only charge for licensing when you use the higher end SKUs with SerDes. Example, you can use and develop on an ECP5 or Certus using their free license, but then you need a paid license to work on ECP5-5G or CertusPro chips.
They're not perfect, but they're better to work with than Xilinx. Also, their datasheetd are better than Xilinx in my experience.
Give Lattice a look for your next project.
FWIW I'm using Yosis for my Ice40 Lattice FPGA purely because their Linux support is bad.
Getting a free hobby license requires emailing them with MAC addresses (which means I have to do that for my desktop, laptop, and again for any future machine I may get). Then getting the tools to actually run on Linux seemed to be impossible that I just gave up.
It's not clear that I have the Yosys and open source options for my Xilinx based fpgas.
https://github.com/openxc7
Does support all FPGAs from the Series7 (Spartan7, Artix7, Kintex7, Zynq70xx)
Ooooh awesome thanks!
> Give Lattice a look for your next project.
Sometime after the heat death of the universe, maybe. IME raising prices during development is their modus operandi.
I came in here to recommend Lattice as well, at least for small glue-logic type applications. I've used their various MaxhXO lines extensively and really enjoy working with them.
Eh... unfortunately they shut down their forums a couple of years ago. So good luck getting any form of support as a free user even if you run into real bugs in their software (believe me, I tried...)
That being said, I have used their ice40 and ECP5 FPGAs with Yosys for a couple of small projects and that worked perfectly fine.
I’m working in education and will change to other vendors in the near future. That means all my students will do so as well.
Windows cannot provide feature parity for workloads that require cross compiling, AMD could at least support RHEL like the old days.
This is the obvious reaction. I wonder what AMD expected would happen if they cut off users, but the obvious expectation is that they'd start looking for alternatives. Especially Linux users, who are not typically inclined to pay licenses for software.
A wide list of FPGA boards is supported by the open source FPGA eco system.
Lattice, Xilinx, Gowin, Renesas, Colognechip,
Generate a bitstream with our online tool. https://caas.symbioticeda.com/
Just of out of curiosity, what parts of the University Program don't appeal to you?
https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/university-program.html
You can get free licenses and donated hardware through this program.
I didn’t like that you are not supporting Linux in your free tier.
Edit: if it is not clear, the way you treat the community is one way I evaluate my decisions to support or not your company when I suggest using your products to others, students or not.
Fair enough but I don’t work for AMD.
Education is only valuable if there's a market for those skills and its hard to have a healthy market without a strong community.
Have you tried docker or WSL2. Modern virtualization should make it possible to seamlessly run Linux while in Windows.
I have, and compared to just running Linux it's not very good. For starters, the shared filesystem is incredibly slow, there is no hardware passthrough support out of the box (even for USB), the graphics support is incomplete and there's lots of non-standard defaults like custom kernel images and a custom init. That's on top of all the bugs and horrible error reporting.
It still beats Windows, but given the choice, I'd much rather just use Linux properly and have all of this just work than waste my time fiddling with WSL/WSL2.
The open source community has hijacked VBox drivers to get USB pass through working and is the official solution from Microsoft to that problem (since it requires a signed driver on the host, and RedHat was authorized to sign drivers, so Microsoft can provide their drivers to work around the signing requirements of the OS)
nobody should support MicroSlop
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AMD dropped support for Linux on the free plan, not the other way around. Nor is this a Linux problem, because they still allow paid users to run the software on Linux.
As far as what's evident from the support thread goes, this is the closest to a justification given:
> AMD expectation is that the BASIC tier licensing level is used for simple, entry‑level needs. While more advanced, production-based workflows are aligned with paid tiers.
Looks like AMD equates Linux to professional use and Windows to simple, entry-level needs :)
If Microsoft didn't have a good operating system it wouldn't have such a dominant market share for the free tier of Vivado. If the Linux community actually properly competed and gained 50% market share then support would not have been dropped. You can't blame companies giving up on Linux on the company itself. Eventually the Linux community will need to take responsibility for their failures.
Link to AMDs description of the new pricing being criticized: https://www.amd.com/en/products/software/adaptive-socs-and-f...
I love the way they buried the “we are no longer supporting an entire operating system” in a small missing tick, half way down the page…
Oh, no, it's sillier than that.
They do still support Linux... but only if you give them money.
This might be a good opportunity for Microsoft to bring back their 'total cost of ownership' advertising campaign.
You don't 2.5x your stock price in two months by underextracting value.
Good news for FOSS FPGA toolchains, I suppose. Eg https://f4pga.org/ for some kind of umbrella project.
As a long time Altera user, one of the biggest things that made me want to jump the fence to Xilinx was the MUCH stronger community and hobbyist uptake. Xilinx benefitted from a ton of people out there educating others on their behalf.
Trying to shrink that community seems like a pretty obvious error. The closest thing the Altera world ever had were the old Altera user forums, which were a gold-mine. Intel shut them down immediately on acquisition. I guess it's AMD's turn.
As someone who actually worked for one of the largest FPGA consumers in the world, Xilinx didn't benefit at all from the community and hobbyist uptake. It was just an unnecessary expense and distraction that got in the way of their core mission. Around 5-10 companies make up around 70% of all FPGA silicon sales and the single largest end user is the U.S. Government and its customers (NATO members, Israel, Australia, Japan, South Korea, etc.). Now that cloud took off, FPGAs are somewhat more used in cloud deployments but usually as a stopgap measure until an ASIC can be developed. And putting the lines on the football field has finally stopped being one of the largest consumers because the broadcasters finally learned that they can load new programming onto the FPGAs instead of just ordering new hardware every time something changes.
They will notice their mistake once the hiring pool dries up.
In the long run they will be replaced by more competitive companies like Efinix.
Trying to read between the lines, here are my lazy sunday morning guesses at what might be going on here:
1. The Xilinx team are pushing back on the increasing number of things they have to support. Silver lining, maybe this means they're being asked to work on a new product that will require redistribution of headcount (like maybe another NPU )
1.1. Their Linux expertise is lacking / stretched across multiple teams (this is the impression I got from following the work in github.com/amd/xdna-driver over the last year or two). Maybe this is the outcome of a 'these are the things i'm doing now, so if you want me to do something new then tell me which of these things I can drop' type conversation & where the pushback is coming from (maybe we'll get some fedora support in that repo though ) .
2. Marketing have been pushing for something that helps them 'fight the AI fight', and it may be that they've now been given the mandate so the division is in the midst of the typical top-down mythical man-day reallocation wave. Xilinx have probably been told that priorities are shifting towards integrating more of the Xilinx inference tech with more mainstream AMD products, possibly at the expense of their existing roadmap. Xilinx have tenured employees who know what they're doing and don't want to retrain/change, so this is a side-effect of the pushback.
3. This is a straight-up monetisation strategy. Marketing ran a project and concluded thta it's just not worth supporting that lower tier for free. It may be that even though have a majority Windows userbase, the [commercially serious | higher stakes | CICD pipeline based] development actually happens on Linux, and this is them closing that loop. Not quite a Docker Desktop situation, but maybe not that dissimilar - they're saying that most professional/commercial users are Linux users, and the days of unlimited free commercial use on the smaller devices are over. Maybe the margins on those lower end devices aren't good enough to justify the amount of support overhead, and pay-to-play will filter out the noise and ensure they're talking to users who are already bought-in. Or, maybe somebody just needs an earnings blip on a slide somewhere, and this is them milking their startup/smb customers.
My guess is it's all of the above.
What I suspect is more likely (given the couple of comments saying "you have to pay to run it on a server") -- Some higher-up in AMD's marketing department has the misconception that Linux isn't a real desktop operating system but is only run on servers. Therefore, all their Linux users are probably companies running Vivaldi on a server, likely using a LLM to do designs. And they should be paying for that.
None of that makes any sense because they still support linux, just not on the free tier.
They aren't saving themselves any time or effort because linux is still supported for paying users.
Yeah, apart from there is more to supporting a product than just compiling a binary.
Case in point, the HN post you're commenting on is a link to their support forum. Search for _anything_ there, and this the pinned article that appears on top of every results page (from feb 2024):
> Is your Operating System supported by ISE/Vivado tools? Assistance and support won’t be provided for software and IP installed on unsupported OS!
> Note: Technical Support and assistance will be provided ONLY for Software and IP installed on supported Operating System!
> It is strongly suggested to check if the OS you are working with, is one of the supported operating system for ISE/Vivado tools!
*There have been many questions where users are trying to install or run into issues with using an unsupported OS for ISE/Vivado tools.*
> Assistance and support won’t be provided for issues observed on unsupported operating system!
> For the list of supported OSs for ISE 14.7, please check page #7 of UG631: https://docs.xilinx.com/v/u/en-US/irn
Platform support != customer support. Search that forum and you'll see. I imagine their paying customers are rejoicing at this decision.
This sucks. I was working on a video course on building CPUs on an FPGA that uses Vivado (because I am somewhat familiar with the ecosystem and have dev boards with Artix FPGAs).
I am still contemplating my options. I can still use Vivado 2025, I guess, but I am not sure that is the right direction.
What are realistic alternatives for Vivado? (Taking into account the availability of supported affordable entry-level dev boards?)
For teaching / learning it's hard to beat Quartus Prime Lite - the virtual JTAG infrastructure (for SignalTap logic analyzer) is much better than the other options. (It's easy to create custom virtual JTAG modules to control and read data from a running design, and these will happily coexist with the logic analyzer.)
Dev board wise QMTech on AliExpress have some really nice entry-level dev boards - the Cyclone 10CL025 board, the daughter board and a clone USB-Blaster cable for programming would weigh in at well under £100.
Terasic have a bunch of different Intel/Altera dev boards, the cheapest being the DE0-Nano - personally I like the DE10-lite, but there are more modern options for those with deeper pockets.
The Tang Nano 20k is a solid and affordable choice for a Gowin chip (though be aware that this particular chip's PLLs are a bit limited and its block RAMs don't have byte enables). The JTAG stuff works but isn't anywhere near as advanced as Intel's.
For Lattice ECP5 there are several options - and these chips are well-supported by yosys/nextpnr and oss-cad-suite in general.
I quite like the IceSugar-Pro ECP5-based board and associated breakout board - but it has a quirky built-in JTAG adapter which isn't supported by the Lattice toolchain, so you'll have to use OpenOCD or OpenFPGALoader to program it, and you can't use the vendor-supplied internal logic analyzer. Its FPGA is well supported by oss-cad-suite, though, which is a big plus.
IcePi-Zero is also well worth considering, available from CrowdSupply.
ULX3S is very nice, too - but as far as I can see it's only available for pre-order on the next production run.
Thank you for your reply! I did a bit of research and, since I do want to use quite some peripherals, I have gone for the ULX3S. A big factor here was documentation and availability; If I would have been able to find a MiSTer Pi I might have gone for that instead.
I now bought a ULX3S on a whim, and will at least evaluate how usable it is for my purposes. It will take quite some time to familiarize myself with a new toolchain, which kinda sucks. One advantage of these big proprietary IDEs is that they integrate a lot of functionality into one "unit" (as far as the user/programmer is concerned), instead of having to install a lot of separate tools.
For the course, I am now considering to "support" an AMD board, an Intel one, and a Lattice one.
Good choice!
oss-cad-suite will give you the open source toolchain for ULX3S in one convenient package. There are plenty of example projects and other resources, plus a discord server. https://ulx3s.github.io/
(Also, to download Lattice Diamond you'll need to make an account on the Lattice website which then needs to be activated. I tried that using a gmail account, and it was never activated - I had to use an email address related to one of my own domains.)
Switch to the open source FPGA tool chain?
https://github.com/openxc7
Charging for Vivado has always struck me as ridiculous. It's a software dongle that enables Xilinx hardware, and the hardware is how they make money. Give Vivado away for free and support it on Linux and Mac, and you'll sell 10x as many chips.
> you'll sell 10x as many chips
The cost of the tooling is probably blocking a few sales, but the biggest blocker for FPGA sales is price of the parts themselves. FPGAs make the most sense where absolute quantities are low and the customer is not cost-sensitive.
As soon as you get volume, ASIC wins out. And cost sensitive applications can almost always make do with a CPU that has the correct IO configuration. For FPGAs to win at scale they'd need to be significantly cheaper.
It feels like bean counter logic. They have a development budget with x% towards linux support which is not enough to fully support linux, so they want linux users to pay to help fund the development. It makes sense in some ways, but I would think the entire software suite would be a loss leader to sell hardware. Less barriers to entry and all that.
except their tools are all the linux ecosystem compiled to windows... it is all gcc based and their tutorials recommends those terminals that mimick Unix. it smells stupid managers + microsoft interference.
Dropping Linux support on the free tier feels like a huge step backward for hobbyists and students. So many academic and open source FPGA workflows rely entirely on Linux environments.
It's really unfortunate that FPGA development is still stuck in the 90s. The incentives between IP owners and hobbyists are so misaligned that I don't see the possibility of this ever improving.
The market is full of dark patterns, and vendors like AMD/Xilinx can pull shitty moves like what OP highlighted, knowing there is no decent alternative (Altera is another disaster). Lattice had the opportunity to fully embrace opensource toolchain and try to disrupt from the bottom, but they seem stuck in the middle, not wanting to commit one way or another.
I'm grateful to SymbiFlow, and IceStorm and others, even though they obviously lack support for proprietary hardware features.
I agree. Once upon a time I was quite interested in FPGAs but the infrastructure being so uninviting in general made me move on completely. I was somewhat recently involved in quantizing neural networks with FINN (AMD) and let's just say...that was a pretty bad experience overall.
Yes, same here. Did my thesis on reconfigurable co-processors in the 00s, then quickly moved away from that market due to the atrocious tooling availability and OS support once I was no longer a student.
How fortunate that Quartus Prime Lite runs under Linux. Something to keep in mind next time you’re selecting a device for a small project.
So does Quartus Prime Pro - and for specific Agilex 5 devices it's also free. (Presumably it was too much trouble to backport support for Agilex to the Lite version.)
There are also free Linux versions of Lattice Diamond, Gowin EDA and Efinix's Efinity software.
For all its faults, you won’t get a rug-pull like this with OSS CAD Suite and something like the ECP5, especially as a hobbyist.
No one seems to have mentioned the obvious question: Does Vivado already run under WINE? If not, are there any major blockers?
Even if it did, the Windows version is vastly inferior to the Linux version with regards to multithreading and other capabilities.
I wonder how good LLM agents are at reverse engineering FPGA bitstreams...
I want a robust open-source ecosystem where anyone can take my hardware projects and modify them without needing to deal with licensing friction.
The difficult part is the place and route algorithm, not the bitstream. The proprietary ones already take quite a long time to solve: I regularly have 12-24h runs. Perhaps an open source one could do better? But it's not quite as straightforward as reverse engineering a proprietary bitstream.
That's why nextpnr exists :)
https://github.com/YosysHQ/nextpnr
As someone actively working on nextpnr support for a fairly new FPGA architecture, it really is amazing that we have something like that in the open source world.
YosysHQ are one of my favorite companies to exist.
Nextpnr and Project X-Ray are amazing projects. Reverse engineering the physical map of, say, a 7-series FPGA is no small feat. However, I wonder if they'll ever be able to really compete with Vivado without getting access to the characterization models for timing. I would love to switch over, but the Fmax of my project routed with nextpnr is less than half of what I get with Vivado.
When I first started doing chip design my boss paid more for tools per year than he paid me ... now days open source tool chains are leaping ahead ... I don't need a boss (or VCs) in order to design chips
I have to admit that I haven't looked too closely into this but my understanding is that place & route is essentially an NP hard optimization problem. Would it be possible to translate this into a SAT problem and solve it with a state of the art SAT solver?
It's surely possible but if it's, for example, 10% slower, that easily eats into execution time and that directly translates into a sense of "maybe it's just worth it to pay the license fee for this year" after just a few 20h place and route runs.
Of course, if it were faster, that would be a huge win for the open source implementation.
Possible but the problem statement is generally way too large to throw into a SAT solver. You can do local problems with SAT though.
Somewhere in reverse-engineering-land is the desire to figure out undocumented hardware blocks. I’m not disagreeing about PNR here.
For reverse engineering, you still need access to the FPGA tools provided by the vendor, to see what changes in the bitstream when you change the design.
If the bitstream is encrypted, you will not see the changes, so the only way is to reverse engineer the Vivado executables.
You do not need only the bitstream, but you also need a huge amount of timing parameters. In theory, they could be obtained by fuzzing, but that would require a huge amount of executions of the Vivado tools. So again the most plausible method is to reverse engineer the Vivado executables, to get the timing parameter database.
In some countries that should be legal, as such reverse engineering might become the only way to use the AMD FPGAs that one buys legally.
Amd is gonna murder xilinx like intel did altera
Software distribution for Linux can be hard. Many distros, different conventions, no FHS is long forgotten, ...
However, Xilinx Vivado and Vitis are so obtusely distributed, making it incredibly hard to package them well.
Three random issues I remember:
1. We had a lot of trouble with Vivado projects randomly breaking. The culprit: German localization combined with automatic clock frequency derivation. Depending on which logic blocks where wired up how, you would get i.e. 99.999 MHz instead of 100 MHz. Apparently, Vivado uses a localized printf (or equivalent) to generate TCL scripts. In German localization, the decimal is a comma, which is interpreted as additional argument in the TCL scripts. 2. For simulation, scripts scripts are copied from a template folder to the user folder, and subsequently adjusted. They are copied in archive mode. If the template is read-only to the current user, so is the new copy, thus failing the subsequent adjustment. 3. If you run the installer with --help as argument, it pops up an X window displaying the help. In general, IIRC, we need to run a headless X just to run the installer in CLI/batch mode.
From a Linux distro maintainer perspective, the packaging is horrible. In particular separation of base installation, configuration, and add-ons is non-existent. Large amount of vendored dependencies, only then to depend on the most minute little packages that Ubuntu supposedly ships.
Setting up a reliable, reproducible CI/CD environment based on Vivado is a large headache.
That all goes to say: if anything, AMD/Xilinx should be paying its customers to deal with this. Unless there is a major improvement in the software distribution practices for Linux, I could not justify to my employer paying money for this experience.
On the other hand, if they commercialize on Linux support, there is soooo much that they can improve by a lot, who knows. Hope dies last and all.
Doesn't help that just to start out you are looking at a 110+ GB size for their tools, which as far as anyone can tell, isn't really justified by anything.
That's because in the EDA space, they have horrible software practices. Take the worst you can imagine and then go worse from there. So eventually, when things "appear to work" they end up taking a snapshot of a messy directory and calling that the deliverable asset.
No, it's just all of the device models. Even the OSS tools take up almost 20 GB of space once you get all of the suppported device models which is not many compared to what Vivado supports.
Why not both? Look at the installables from Cadence, they are full of redundant garbage, broken rpaths, etc. Tools that don't even need to support devices have 5-8GB compressed installables with 12-20GB of on disk space being taken up.
Horribly broken installers and a mess of environment variables needed to get the software to even run.
Speculation:
1) This could actually be an attempt to gain more revenue from big customers that have users who use the free version to test that code can synthesize and run unit tests (by pretending to use smaller parts), and then only use the paid version for the final integration into the actual larger parts.
2) This could give them more customer data more easily. They make no secret of the fact that the free tiers share data with the mothership for product improvement reasons. Maybe they only want to maintain the infrastructure to do this on Windows, or maybe it's harder for customers to subvert on Windows.
3) There will be people running the Windows version on Linux, and explaining how to do it, in 3... 2... 1...
Are the prices so insane this is actually a viable option instead of just buying a bigger license? I always tell juniors to just submit a request for a licence since it will likely cost far less than retraining them or making them work harder and more to compensate for splitting things up (not FPGA related though).
The problem with FPGA builds is that the search space is ginormous, and repeated optimizations are tried in order to, e.g. make it meet the circuit timing requirements.
So, depending on exactly what you are doing it might take many hours to do a full build. And that might soak up all the capacity of a computer. And your Xilinx licenses are either node-locked (so only on that computer) or floating (so, only for one process/user on one computer at a time). You could conceivably have a big computer and timeshare multiple jobs on it, but (a) then you have to have the node-locked license, and (b) no matter what, you'll be slowing down your long job somewhat, by reducing the number of cores and amount of RAM available to it.
So it's definitely worthwhile to have multiple builds of different things going, preferably on different computers.
Organizations that use these sorts of tools typically have a lot of different tools that cost huge bucks compared to Xilinx software (think $100K/seat vs $4K), so this means that (a) they have entire organizations devoted to license management and working hard to ensure that all licenses are reasonably utilized; and (b) the relative cost to them to counteract this move by Xilinx (AMD) and just buy a few more damned Vivado licenses will not really be that high.
Now, do I think this is short-sighted? Yes, probably.
But do I also think that it could be revenue-positive for AMD in the short term? Yes, probably.
Just a random rant: I used to do FPGA work for a living, and I remember Xilinx's ISE (Vivado before they renamed it and the company got bought by AMD) was Windows-only, but the first thing that popped up when starting it was a Cygwin window :D
Well, currently if you want to run the last version of Xilinx ISE 14.7* in Windows, Xilinx will have you download a linux VM to do so (14.7 was originally supported on Windows, but support was dropped after it broke).
On a side note: ISE was discontinued in 2013, but AMD only announced the acquisition in 2020, so I found it strange that those events appear to be linked in your comment?
*ISE is still required for any FPGAs older than 7 (like Virtex/Spartan 6).
Why would customers trust a company that does rug pull penny pinching moves like this? Tells me a lot.
Perhaps an alternative for some applications: https://colognechip.com/programmable-logic/gatemate/
Welp, guess I'm glad my grad school project is using a Cyclone FPGA, Intel+Quartus, here I come.
Another casualty of this will be running the tools in docker containers, some folks have made some good templates for them and they greatly simplify deployment/installation.
(I used to prefer the AMD/Xilinx dev setup, but that has been a bit, and using FuseSoC makes moving platforms a lot easier).
This is terrible news for university users trying to professionalize their FPGA development with CI/CD. Which is probably the point of the change.
There is a ridiculous amount of flagging here. Every comment that says the Linux community gets to show its stuff by doing the work themselves gets flagged. That is no bueno. I've already vouched for several.
Every single of those comments is implicitly saying you should violate the IP rights of the FPGA vendor.
There is no realistic way to build an OSS or FOSS toolchain without reverse engineering Vivado and dumping the trade secrets contained in it 1:1
Even if you build a clean room version of Vivado, you still need the FPGA metadata and clean rooming the metadata for all FPGAs is basically impossible.
Once you understand this, then it sounds incredible dishonest to argue that the Linux community should put in the effort to support a hardware vendor that is hostile to offering their own Linux support when that same company's GPU division had no problem publishing an open source GPU driver for Linux.
Yes. You should dare to violate their IP rights and not put your name on the project. Just port the Windows version to Linux by linking it with winelib.
Extracting trade secrets isn't a violation of anyone's IP rights. Trade secrets are protected against being leaked by employees but they are explicitly not protected against reverse engineering.
It took a small company I worked for months to get new licenses due to AMD just not responding. I'm not sure they have the ability to actually handle this in a timely manner
I wonder if they will come to their senses and revert the decision? It does seem a bit boneheaded to drop Linux support on the Basic tier... What actual reason would they need to do that?
This Anatoli forum moderator looks like to be quite a very bad user representative.
I can understand that they wouldn't reply to the user but the way he replies is aggressive and would motivate me more to insult AMD and co that have a civil exchange.
That being said, it really sucks when companies do such asshole move as forcing you to use windows. Especially because it was not even AMD in the first place but they snatched xilinx and now will try to use the big tech playbook.
Hoping for a decent Chinese alternative to AMD and Intel...
Supposedly this is going to be resolved, according to this Tweet. Just here-say basically but some hope. https://x.com/HotAisle/status/2059706563665998317
Money. It is always money. It has always been money. It will always be money.
As long as guys with ties get away with it, it will keep happening.
This is the absolute dumbest decision imaginable. The only people hurt by the removal of free trial software for Linux are students and amateurs.
Even Apple, possibly the greediest company in the world, knows the importance of cheap hardware and free software for students. Because those students and amateurs eventually become pros who make money decisions.
AMD is always so close to pulling ahead of Intel and Nvidia but somehow manage to shoot themselves in the foot constantly...
I think they've pulled ahead of Intel by a large margin
In market cap maybe but in total units sold? In importance?
~70% of PCs/servers sold have Intel chips in them.
Well Gowin here I come I guess
I took Efinix. They have cute FPGA with memory in one package. It saves me lots of time for routing the board.
They are all the same. Greedy little bitches.
What a bs move by amd, they should have taken a lesson from the cuda situation.
What a dog move!
Another one of those reflex-triggering moments:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tQIdxbWhHSM
What’s next? Take away mouse support in the free tier? You could these fucking cretins with GPT2 and the company would flourish.
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I can see American companies quickly loose market dominance to Chinese FPGA manufacturers with this short sighted behavior. People don’t realize how big FPGAs are in Asia.
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So obviously none of this is realistic, even the foundations of it don't align with reality, so what point are you trying to make with this comment? I'm afraid it's going over my head.
AMD is acting like French Aristocracy and they’re telling Linux users to eat cake. It’d be nice if there was digital infrastructure and social will to metaphorically take their heads.
This is the comment that should be [flagged] [dead] instead of all the ones saying why doesn't the Linux community step up...
Some replies complain about the moderator not answering the main question. While this is a valid complaint, it is also likely that they don't know the answer as well. Now, the best reply would be to openly say that they don't have visibility into upper management's decisions. But, at the same time, I think it's possible that the way they're replying has to do with some internal guidelines on how to handle this sort of questions.
My personal thoughts on this is that EDA tooling is quite expensive to license, and I'm sure many people have jailbroken their Linux versions to avoid paying for the higher tiers, as Linux doesn't have as strong anti-tamper/app sandboxing capabilities as the other 2 big OSes.
Not saying I agree or support this decision, but I can see why they chose to do this, and their set of paying customers is quite different from your average piece of software.
If this were Google, they'd have made the whole backend of it cloud only, and required all customers to upload all data to their servers. Obviously this doesn't fly in a lot of industries FPGAs tend to be used in.
How is it sustainable for AMD to maintain their software on Linux for free? Would you maintain your own Linux software (and its distros) for $0?
I see no problem with monetizing Linux users. If I am monetizing Windows and macOS users, there should be no exceptions towards Linux especially as Linux support is always ill defined (there are hundreds of distros to support and test.)
So much wrong with your comment.
1: The software is not free. There is what essentially amounts to a free trial. This free trial used to support Windows and Linux. Now the free version only supports Windows, only the paid tiers work on Linux.
2: The software is what amounts to a hardware-specific compiler/IDE. AMD sells the hardware, with healthy margins. Asking "how is it sustainable for AMD to maintain [Vivado] .. for free" is the same as asking, "how is it sustainable for AMD to maintain their OpenGL drivers for free". They have a solid revenue stream from hardware sales that's enabled by the software.
3: Maintaining a free Linux version is close to 0 additional cost. They already need to maintain a free tier because they provide that to Windows, they already need to maintain Linux support because they provide that for the paid tiers. The only extra maintenance would be whatever edge case bugs occur only on the free tier and only when compiled for Linux.
> I see no problem with monetizing Linux users. If I am monetizing Windows and macOS users, there should be no exceptions towards Linux
Here I agree with you - Linux users shouldn't expect any special privileges here. But we're not asking for special treatment, we're asking that we continue to be given the same options as Windows users, just as we were for all previous versions of the software.
What people are objecting to is that for the latest version (and future versions) of the software an existing free tier has been withdrawn from Linux users - and only from Linux users.
First of all, you already pay for the FPGAs, and the only reason why you pay for them is that they are "Field-Programmable" GAs. To be able to use the product that you own, as advertised, you MUST have the AMD software tools, because they refuse to provide the technical documentation that would allow the use of FPGAs without vendor-provided tools.
It is abusive to request an additional big payment in order to use the bought product as intended. This additional payment for the FPGA programming tool is negligible for big companies, which also get great discounts in the price of the FPGAs they buy, but it hurts any small companies and individuals who want to use FPGAs.
These kind of policies never increase in any way the revenue of a company like AMD but they ensure that any market where such policies are frequent become dominated by a few quasi-monopolies, instead of having a healthy competition that keeps prices low for computers, as it existed in electronics until around a quarter of century ago.
Their FPGA development software is not an independent product, but it is a part of the FPGAs they are selling, like the boxes in which such FPGAs are packaged.
Your claim that they get $0 for their software is as ridiculous as the claim that Intel can no longer sell boxed CPUs, because they get $0 for the cardboard and plastic packages of their CPUs.
For now, only the Linux version of the FPGA tools has been discontinued, the free and worse Windows version still exists, so what you say in the last version of your comment is still wrong, because the Windows users are not monetized, yet.
They are selling hardware.
You'd think removing friction on the software side for someone who already bought their hardware would be in their interest. Especially for students and hobbyists, who will want use what they already know once they enter the industry.
Maintaining support for Windows is free?
"free" as in what? Time?
There is always someone paying. Linux should be no different.
The users are paying plenty of money for AMD FPGAs.
> why I can use BASIC tier for simple, entry-level nodes on Windows, but not on Linux.
That’s exactly what people are asking for. Why do Linux users have to pay and Windows users don’t.
Why should Windows be different?
How is is sustainable for Apple to maintain MacOS for free? I see not problem with monetizing Mac users by making them pay extra for OS and especially its upgrades.