Comment by zephen

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.