> “Until now, it has been available for free on both Windows and Linux”
If it’s any consolation, it wasn’t and still isn’t available on macOS. Also the part about Linux having a “small user base” made me chuckle.
That’s the opposite of what I’m observing. If they wanted to save costs, they would have dropped Linux support altogether. But instead, they are making it a paid benefit. It can only mean that their Linux user base is growing, ie. more commercial operators are turning to Linux. Still, there are much better ways to handle this without alienating your user base.
> It can only mean that their Linux user base is growing, ie. more commercial operators are turning to Linux.
Well, more correctly that they think the commercial base has grown, and that there's revenue on the table by forcing their standard-edition-using commercial Linux users into contracts.
Maybe the thinking is that the Linux users are more sophisticated and able to self-support than windows shops, and so they're choosing not to buy support even though they could? Seems not implausible, though hard to measure even from within AMD.
Basically this seems like a "good beancounting but terrible marketing" decision out of product management. They're not being deliberately mean to their amateur users, they're just trying to squeeze out a few more dollars for their department's quarterly.
What is really interesting about Linux users is that they cost an enormous amount in support.
I think it was a dev of the reboot of Planetary Annihilation that said their Linux users / build made up a few percent of the sales but over 90 percent of all support tickets (!). Mind you that this was before Valve's Proton.
Exactly why we zero asic is making Platypus devices open bitstream and all tooling foss from day one...to protect the world against future evil/dumb version of ourselves.
Of course we don't have silicon yet...so nobody here cares. I think a lot of people forget that Xilinx spent $10B+ develop their awesome devices. I figure we can do it with 1/10th of that.;-)
IDK where it's at now, but 15 years ago xilinx was some of the most garbage software I'd ever worked with. Super buggy, constantly corrupting itself, and this was for me just doing university level projects.
God speed if you can get something a lot better for a lot cheaper.
Quartus was not much better on Linux. Honestly I was really into FPGA's around 2010-12 but gave up as I could not afford the full suites at the time and the software was fucking miserable to work with. They were prone to license amnesia and lord help you after running updates, something likely breaks. OR maybe one day it decides to not work anymore and crash continually. Then you spend hours gnashing your teeth, fighting the install, searching through forums and screaming into the void for help. It was mentally draining.
FPGA software gave me FPGA PTSD. I still to this day don't want to go near them - but I am dying to get back into using them. Help ...
All the FPGA vendors' tools are pretty bad, and have little incentive to improve because their software is the only option for using their chips, outside of a few niche (and generally quite small) devices.
I imagine it's due to having had decent enough GPUs and decent enough CPUs, from a single vendor.
If you want the platform to be x86 but not AMD then your only other choice is Intel, but they've only recently started making high performance GPUs. So then you need another vendor for the GPU, and your only choice is Nvidia.
A lot simpler, cheaper and predictable to go with a single vendor for both I imagine?
Non-paying users aren’t customers, though, so they must view all this outrage seems irrelevant. Which suggests that they view free-tier Linux users as significantly less likely to ever pay for its use. That matches my understanding of the (non-Steam) Linux as a miserly and demanding target market, so I don’t really fault them for the choice — especially given how brutally expensive it is to support the IDIC of Miscellaneous Linuxes. Kind of surprised they haven’t just withdrawn free support for anything but Steam Linux, in order to lower their costs (and to produce a ‘free’ build that anyone can run privately but doesn’t interop at all with enterprise). Maybe they want it to be a ‘shareware trial’ for enterprise? Or perhaps they just haven’t thought of it yet.
The "free" version of Vivado is used to develop for Xilinx/AMD's lower tier FPGAs. While offering what I assume are lower profit margins, these lower tier FPGAs make up a large portion of Xilinx/AMD's chip volume.
Xilinx/AMD charging for any of their tools is also a recent thing. 20 years ago, you could download these tools freely without even having to register on their website.
Whelp, I’m an embedded engineering consultant and will no longer recommend these products to my customers. Or rather, I will ask them to avoid these products entirely.
AMD, you can make more money selling chips than software, but take away the entry level software and you eliminate the on-ramp. I’m not buying a license to prototype.
Very few, entreprise users (aka volume) will pay the license, hobbyists will pirate it if need be.
AMD doesn't want to do support for the hobbyists for free, that's all.
While Vivado/Vitis etc do amazing things, I challenge anyone to find a person who enjoys using them without TCL interfaces.
These tools do need attention, it's too bad there's not a better model than subscription bases like these.
Pretty sure, based on TCL base, that these tools were native Unix at some point, so the no-linux-free-beer vs windows-free-beer version are hilarious...
Ultimately one has, with so many vendor tools, a windows box somewhere so make it a remote compile machine.
We shouldn't wait for them to get their act together, as it's in the best interest of a cartel to not have competitors, compatibility, and transparency.
It should be required after a certain amount of time that schematics and code be open sourced and that anti-walled-garden measures are prevalent so we get compatibility and extensibility right out of the box.
When AMD bought Xilinx I was hoping they'd open up the software side like they (eventually) did with their GPU drivers. Looks like that isn't happening anytime soon.
It seems silly to put up SW barriers for people to use your fairly expensive HW, but what do I know.
But you just showed you have deep pockets and they think they can get you to open it again every year for the rest of time.
Xilinx was never positioned that it made sense for them to open it up. If/when it gets run into the ground by AMD short sightedness they might just open it to claim that was the plan all along...
NVIDIA ended support for their 10xx series [1]. To be clear, AMD also moved support for their equivalent 5xxx series to legacy drivers [2], but "supports their cards for many years" doesn't hold value if both companies stopped their respective GPUs at basically the same time.
Also remember that one of those 2 companies has opensource drivers for Linux for their old GPUs, while the other doesn't (newer NVIDIA GPUs have an opensource driver but this isn't the case for the 10xx series). Users of legacy NVIDIA cards needs on Linux needs to use their old driver branches, with results that are less than optimal to say the least.
Pretty sure this 'article' was written by an LLM, having scraped the HN discussion on here from 4 days ago. Nothing new there apart from a clickbait title and a ton of ads.
> Its comparatively smaller user base means less commercial pressure, making it an easy target to throw under the bus whenever companies feel like cutting costs or boosting profits.
Eventually the empire will strike back though.
I now marked AMD as a company that can not be trusted.
We need more indie companies in general, and cheap 3d printing for the masses. It'll be a long way to go to nanoscale perfection, but we'll have to go it - AMD but also Intel before, showed that NONE of those mega-greedy corporations can be trusted. They'll always try to do a switcheroo move. But as I stated here: the empire will strike back eventually. The Barbara Streisand effect is real.
Folks feel outrage when companies start charging for things that were once free.
Okay, but what if you run a company whose business model no longer supports giving away free stuff? How can you transition? What would users consider less outrageous?
AMD isn't giving away free stuff. They are selling FPGA hardware. But further, the free stuff has a lot of restrictions around it which practically gear it only for university usage. And the reason they do that is they want to have new graduates have experience with their software so they can demand it from their future employers.
Basic Vivado is the bare minimum to develop for their hardware. A large amount of functionality is still locked away behind paid IP.
Most of the revenue comes from the IP cores.
A common business model for companies like this is to enable developers to learn their tools cheaply, so that when they develop something for their employer, they're more likely to reach for those tools/ecosystems and have the employer pay for those tools.
This just cuts out beginner/hobbyist FPGA devs from using industry standard tooling.
You need to buy their hardware to use it. In fact there is no way to use most of their hardware without Vivado. So it's more like they are blocking you from using things you've already paid for
The software is useless without their chips and the chips cost a fortune. It's not "business model no longer supports giving away free stuff". It's just bean-counters cutting corners.
if "the ai" was delivering value you'd think it would be lowering both cost to develop these dev tools as well as the cost to support them. In that light the move is odd unless they don't know how to use AI to lower those costs or it cant.
I mean perhaps the silver lining is the projects I use are all stuck on 2022.1 for now. I wonder if this is because they want to gate usage by AI agents.
They want their *own* CUDA situation. if you're doing FPGA stuff, the Xilinx hardware is good and Vivaldi is really the only way to use it. AFAIK the open-source fpga situation is pretty far behind it (please correct me if I'm wrong, I work in a place that uses Xilinx FPGAs)
What better way to do that than decrease availability, I ask, both rhetorically and sarcastically. CUDA-proper did well, at least partially, because it was put in front of everyone. This is going for an exclusivity angle that doesn't make much sense for ecosystem development, IMO.
I suspect this goes to show how much influence B2B carries.
I seriously think the CUDA situation was set up intentionally.
Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) is related to Lisa Su (AMD CEO).
A decade ago, I saw a demo of some AMD skunkworks GPU datacenter tech, that could execute CUDA natively on AMD/ATI graphics cards. Initially was half speed, but having the flexibility was crazy amazing. Created a big buzz in the big iron and educational markets.
Where'd it go? Buried. You cant even find articles about it. Its a few comments on edtech datacenters.
Now look at AMD's graphics line. Where's their ROCm LLM tooling? It's a fucking joke. Its like they're intentionally sinking it for her Nvidia uncle Huang. And Su takes the cheaper CPU market and offers better features than Intel.
I'm not trying to dismiss what you're saying as a possibility (AMD's behavior in many regards over the last 15 years or so is baffling to the point that a family conspiracy feels surprisingly plausible) but Huang isn't Su's uncle.
They are "first cousins once removed" meaning that Su is the child of one of Huang's cousins. Or put another way, one of Huang's grandparents is one of Su's great-grandparents.
There's no free alternatives, because AMD doesn't document the bitstream format (i.e. what you need to push to the FPGA to program it to do wha you want).
This software seems to never have been open source/freely licensed. That's not a bait and switch. They were giving you a commercial product, for free, and now have decided not to.
It's likely a case where maintaining separate builds for the free and commercial tiers was getting complex. Often times, this kind of software requires lots of manual reviewing and adding or removing modules, and they probably decided it's just not worth it.
I don't see how that particular line of thinking applies when:
1) They continue to have a free version for Windows
2) They continue to have a version for Linux
I just can't see that cost of having a free Linux version (on top having a paid Linux version) is big?
Think academic and small companies who don't pay for support opening corner case issues all the time publicly. They want none of the complex support unless you pay (reasonable imo).
And for those who forget RHEL for instance has to pay salaries to back port fixes and such and the same logic applies here.
I literally explained the thinking that the free builds on Linux aren't worth it. If you've ever shipped production software, you'd know this. Just because there's a free build available for Windows doesn't mean it costs the company $0 to release the free build. It's a lot of extra time and QA for each variant of a release. There might be many differences between the Windows and Linux builds, such as the Linux builds require proprietary 3rd party code with royalties, and they chose not to eat that cost.
There's no bait and switch. It's just people expecting things for free, as always, when this was never an open source project.
AMD is not a good company. They stopped innovating after Intel was put down. Except, now Intel has govt backing while AMD will face significantly more competition from not only x86 but arm. Stock price says otherwise but I think they had more than enough time to catch up to Nvidia and simply refused to compete.
> “Until now, it has been available for free on both Windows and Linux”
If it’s any consolation, it wasn’t and still isn’t available on macOS. Also the part about Linux having a “small user base” made me chuckle.
That’s the opposite of what I’m observing. If they wanted to save costs, they would have dropped Linux support altogether. But instead, they are making it a paid benefit. It can only mean that their Linux user base is growing, ie. more commercial operators are turning to Linux. Still, there are much better ways to handle this without alienating your user base.
> It can only mean that their Linux user base is growing, ie. more commercial operators are turning to Linux.
Well, more correctly that they think the commercial base has grown, and that there's revenue on the table by forcing their standard-edition-using commercial Linux users into contracts.
Maybe the thinking is that the Linux users are more sophisticated and able to self-support than windows shops, and so they're choosing not to buy support even though they could? Seems not implausible, though hard to measure even from within AMD.
Basically this seems like a "good beancounting but terrible marketing" decision out of product management. They're not being deliberately mean to their amateur users, they're just trying to squeeze out a few more dollars for their department's quarterly.
What is really interesting about Linux users is that they cost an enormous amount in support.
I think it was a dev of the reboot of Planetary Annihilation that said their Linux users / build made up a few percent of the sales but over 90 percent of all support tickets (!). Mind you that this was before Valve's Proton.
Edit: It was <0.1% sales but 20% of all support tickets: https://xcancel.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760
4 replies →
Exactly why we zero asic is making Platypus devices open bitstream and all tooling foss from day one...to protect the world against future evil/dumb version of ourselves.
https://www.zeroasic.com/platypus https://www.zeroasic.com/projects/wildebeest https://www.zeroasic.com/projects/logik
Of course we don't have silicon yet...so nobody here cares. I think a lot of people forget that Xilinx spent $10B+ develop their awesome devices. I figure we can do it with 1/10th of that.;-)
IDK where it's at now, but 15 years ago xilinx was some of the most garbage software I'd ever worked with. Super buggy, constantly corrupting itself, and this was for me just doing university level projects.
God speed if you can get something a lot better for a lot cheaper.
Quartus was not much better on Linux. Honestly I was really into FPGA's around 2010-12 but gave up as I could not afford the full suites at the time and the software was fucking miserable to work with. They were prone to license amnesia and lord help you after running updates, something likely breaks. OR maybe one day it decides to not work anymore and crash continually. Then you spend hours gnashing your teeth, fighting the install, searching through forums and screaming into the void for help. It was mentally draining.
FPGA software gave me FPGA PTSD. I still to this day don't want to go near them - but I am dying to get back into using them. Help ...
All the FPGA vendors' tools are pretty bad, and have little incentive to improve because their software is the only option for using their chips, outside of a few niche (and generally quite small) devices.
It's long been said:
"AMD never misses a chance to miss a chance."
In this case, the chance to trash its reputation with customers.
especially their marketing dept which made this decision seems to be run by absolute buffoons
I bet this decision was made by showing an Excel sheet.
AMD has long been the proof that hardware is easier than software. Apparently, hardware is also easier than marketing.
I wish more software engineers found out how easy hardware actually is.
2 replies →
I'm even surprised they have so much of the console market
I imagine it's due to having had decent enough GPUs and decent enough CPUs, from a single vendor.
If you want the platform to be x86 but not AMD then your only other choice is Intel, but they've only recently started making high performance GPUs. So then you need another vendor for the GPU, and your only choice is Nvidia.
A lot simpler, cheaper and predictable to go with a single vendor for both I imagine?
5 replies →
Should be the first of the two chances for the phrase to work.
Non-paying users aren’t customers, though, so they must view all this outrage seems irrelevant. Which suggests that they view free-tier Linux users as significantly less likely to ever pay for its use. That matches my understanding of the (non-Steam) Linux as a miserly and demanding target market, so I don’t really fault them for the choice — especially given how brutally expensive it is to support the IDIC of Miscellaneous Linuxes. Kind of surprised they haven’t just withdrawn free support for anything but Steam Linux, in order to lower their costs (and to produce a ‘free’ build that anyone can run privately but doesn’t interop at all with enterprise). Maybe they want it to be a ‘shareware trial’ for enterprise? Or perhaps they just haven’t thought of it yet.
The "free" version of Vivado is used to develop for Xilinx/AMD's lower tier FPGAs. While offering what I assume are lower profit margins, these lower tier FPGAs make up a large portion of Xilinx/AMD's chip volume.
Xilinx/AMD charging for any of their tools is also a recent thing. 20 years ago, you could download these tools freely without even having to register on their website.
Vivado is an IDE for programming AMD FPGAs. One cannot use it without buying AMD hardware.
5 replies →
Whelp, I’m an embedded engineering consultant and will no longer recommend these products to my customers. Or rather, I will ask them to avoid these products entirely.
AMD, you can make more money selling chips than software, but take away the entry level software and you eliminate the on-ramp. I’m not buying a license to prototype.
Advanced Marking Disaster original thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309
Found the UserBenchmark alt!
Discussion from 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309
Is anyone else annoyed by the click-/rage-bait style of writing?
Second: Can this software be run from Wine on Linux?
Kinda shitty but just a minor speed bump. Just run Windows on a VM in Linux, right?
Large company again makes local decision without considering the effects outside that single product line.
I wonder how many Linux GPU sales their decision to penalize Linux on their FPGA line will cost them.
Very few, entreprise users (aka volume) will pay the license, hobbyists will pirate it if need be. AMD doesn't want to do support for the hobbyists for free, that's all.
No, AMD wants to collect some rent from people running Vivado in CI/CD environments.
Understandable. But would it be much easier to release it without promise to support. That everyone would just accept.
>I wonder how many Linux GPU sales their decision to penalize Linux on their FPGA line will cost them.
Not many I would guess.
considering nvidia has garbage gpu drivers in linux land and amd has pretty good ones i suspect you’re correct.
While Vivado/Vitis etc do amazing things, I challenge anyone to find a person who enjoys using them without TCL interfaces.
These tools do need attention, it's too bad there's not a better model than subscription bases like these.
Pretty sure, based on TCL base, that these tools were native Unix at some point, so the no-linux-free-beer vs windows-free-beer version are hilarious...
Ultimately one has, with so many vendor tools, a windows box somewhere so make it a remote compile machine.
Smacks of collusion honestly. Maybe Microsoft offered them some kind of deal
Never understood why FPGA vendors do it. Do they desperately want to show software ARR to shareholders?
Always think about stuff like this, when asserting how much better AMD happens to be versus NVidia.
I'm guessing it works fine under Wine.
Imagine if AMD focused on making their tools better instead of resorting to sleazy tactics.
Imagine if the whole industry made interoperable tools that worked on open data formats and competed on merit instead of customer lock-in.
Imagine the world we could have.
We shouldn't wait for them to get their act together, as it's in the best interest of a cartel to not have competitors, compatibility, and transparency.
It should be required after a certain amount of time that schematics and code be open sourced and that anti-walled-garden measures are prevalent so we get compatibility and extensibility right out of the box.
When AMD bought Xilinx I was hoping they'd open up the software side like they (eventually) did with their GPU drivers. Looks like that isn't happening anytime soon.
It seems silly to put up SW barriers for people to use your fairly expensive HW, but what do I know.
But you just showed you have deep pockets and they think they can get you to open it again every year for the rest of time.
Xilinx was never positioned that it made sense for them to open it up. If/when it gets run into the ground by AMD short sightedness they might just open it to claim that was the plan all along...
I have specifically chosen AMD _many_ times in the past precisely because of their better linux support and more open toolchain.
This is an absolute foot-gun moment. And the gaslighting PR responses are just unacceptable. I'm very disappointed in them.
Nvidia supports their cards for many years - even quite old cards often have modern drivers.
AMD just does not see the world this way.
NVIDIA ended support for their 10xx series [1]. To be clear, AMD also moved support for their equivalent 5xxx series to legacy drivers [2], but "supports their cards for many years" doesn't hold value if both companies stopped their respective GPUs at basically the same time.
Also remember that one of those 2 companies has opensource drivers for Linux for their old GPUs, while the other doesn't (newer NVIDIA GPUs have an opensource driver but this isn't the case for the 10xx series). Users of legacy NVIDIA cards needs on Linux needs to use their old driver branches, with results that are less than optimal to say the least.
[1]: https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-officially-ends-geforce-g...
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/amd-says-that-its-no...
This is about their FPGA tooling. It has nothing whatsoever to do with GPUs.
3 replies →
> Starting with the 2026.1 release
Don't upgrade. It's just that simple.
Do they offer some unique features in the new version or is it a habit to upgrade everything every day?
QoR for advanced and large designs can change wildly between versions (for better or worse.)
Yes, working with recent distros. At some point I spun up a vm because there was no way to make it work after an upgrade.
Read the article. The old version will not be supported soon. I assume that means you also won't be able to register it.
People are still using Vivado 2019 (and earlier) and ISE. The ability to use these versions isn't going anywhere.
Pretty sure this 'article' was written by an LLM, having scraped the HN discussion on here from 4 days ago. Nothing new there apart from a clickbait title and a ton of ads.
Link to my comment, so that I don't repeat myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256417
> Its comparatively smaller user base means less commercial pressure, making it an easy target to throw under the bus whenever companies feel like cutting costs or boosting profits.
Eventually the empire will strike back though.
I now marked AMD as a company that can not be trusted.
We need more indie companies in general, and cheap 3d printing for the masses. It'll be a long way to go to nanoscale perfection, but we'll have to go it - AMD but also Intel before, showed that NONE of those mega-greedy corporations can be trusted. They'll always try to do a switcheroo move. But as I stated here: the empire will strike back eventually. The Barbara Streisand effect is real.
Folks feel outrage when companies start charging for things that were once free.
Okay, but what if you run a company whose business model no longer supports giving away free stuff? How can you transition? What would users consider less outrageous?
AMD isn't giving away free stuff. They are selling FPGA hardware. But further, the free stuff has a lot of restrictions around it which practically gear it only for university usage. And the reason they do that is they want to have new graduates have experience with their software so they can demand it from their future employers.
Basic Vivado is the bare minimum to develop for their hardware. A large amount of functionality is still locked away behind paid IP.
Most of the revenue comes from the IP cores.
A common business model for companies like this is to enable developers to learn their tools cheaply, so that when they develop something for their employer, they're more likely to reach for those tools/ecosystems and have the employer pay for those tools.
This just cuts out beginner/hobbyist FPGA devs from using industry standard tooling.
It’s still free on Windows. Your argument doesn’t have legs to walk on.
Even more than that, they still have to maintain the software to work on Linux, because they have a paid on Linux.
So if they have to keep maintaining it and offer the basic tier for free on Linux... just why? It doesn't make any sense to me.
Maybe they receive "too many" bug reports from Linux users?
1 reply →
You need to buy their hardware to use it. In fact there is no way to use most of their hardware without Vivado. So it's more like they are blocking you from using things you've already paid for
The software is useless without their chips and the chips cost a fortune. It's not "business model no longer supports giving away free stuff". It's just bean-counters cutting corners.
The rumor on the FPGA reddit is that they're going to walk it back.
Quote: 'The only source I can give at this time is "trust me bro"'
Hot Aisle on Twitter say they heard it directly from AMD, but I haven't seen any kind of public announcement yet.
https://twitter.com/HotAisle/status/2059706563665998317
if "the ai" was delivering value you'd think it would be lowering both cost to develop these dev tools as well as the cost to support them. In that light the move is odd unless they don't know how to use AI to lower those costs or it cant.
I think AMD simply looked at the numbers and they get a lot of support requests for the free version, more than the Windows version
(of course that's the bean counter calculation without factoring in "karma")
And I kinda agree, the cost of supporting those tools on different platforms is not great
Honestly just run Wine
I mean perhaps the silver lining is the projects I use are all stuck on 2022.1 for now. I wonder if this is because they want to gate usage by AI agents.
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309
Also this site (itsfoss.com) is unusable and riddled with hundreds of ads and sets my machines fans to full blast.
At least use another credible source or go to the source instead as per the HN guidelines.
Incredible, behaving as if they want another CUDA situation.
They want their *own* CUDA situation. if you're doing FPGA stuff, the Xilinx hardware is good and Vivaldi is really the only way to use it. AFAIK the open-source fpga situation is pretty far behind it (please correct me if I'm wrong, I work in a place that uses Xilinx FPGAs)
> They want their *own* CUDA situation
What better way to do that than decrease availability, I ask, both rhetorically and sarcastically. CUDA-proper did well, at least partially, because it was put in front of everyone. This is going for an exclusivity angle that doesn't make much sense for ecosystem development, IMO.
I suspect this goes to show how much influence B2B carries.
I seriously think the CUDA situation was set up intentionally.
Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) is related to Lisa Su (AMD CEO).
A decade ago, I saw a demo of some AMD skunkworks GPU datacenter tech, that could execute CUDA natively on AMD/ATI graphics cards. Initially was half speed, but having the flexibility was crazy amazing. Created a big buzz in the big iron and educational markets.
Where'd it go? Buried. You cant even find articles about it. Its a few comments on edtech datacenters.
Now look at AMD's graphics line. Where's their ROCm LLM tooling? It's a fucking joke. Its like they're intentionally sinking it for her Nvidia uncle Huang. And Su takes the cheaper CPU market and offers better features than Intel.
I'm not trying to dismiss what you're saying as a possibility (AMD's behavior in many regards over the last 15 years or so is baffling to the point that a family conspiracy feels surprisingly plausible) but Huang isn't Su's uncle.
They are "first cousins once removed" meaning that Su is the child of one of Huang's cousins. Or put another way, one of Huang's grandparents is one of Su's great-grandparents.
2 replies →
That's what you get for using unfree software.
There's no free alternatives, because AMD doesn't document the bitstream format (i.e. what you need to push to the FPGA to program it to do wha you want).
This isn't why there are no free alternatives: there are for 7 Series chips. Free alternatives have terrible QoR.
I'm fairly sure the FPGA space is big enough there are alternate products for most of the offerings
1 reply →
[dead]
This software seems to never have been open source/freely licensed. That's not a bait and switch. They were giving you a commercial product, for free, and now have decided not to.
It's likely a case where maintaining separate builds for the free and commercial tiers was getting complex. Often times, this kind of software requires lots of manual reviewing and adding or removing modules, and they probably decided it's just not worth it.
I don't see how that particular line of thinking applies when: 1) They continue to have a free version for Windows 2) They continue to have a version for Linux
I just can't see that cost of having a free Linux version (on top having a paid Linux version) is big?
Think academic and small companies who don't pay for support opening corner case issues all the time publicly. They want none of the complex support unless you pay (reasonable imo).
And for those who forget RHEL for instance has to pay salaries to back port fixes and such and the same logic applies here.
1 reply →
I literally explained the thinking that the free builds on Linux aren't worth it. If you've ever shipped production software, you'd know this. Just because there's a free build available for Windows doesn't mean it costs the company $0 to release the free build. It's a lot of extra time and QA for each variant of a release. There might be many differences between the Windows and Linux builds, such as the Linux builds require proprietary 3rd party code with royalties, and they chose not to eat that cost.
There's no bait and switch. It's just people expecting things for free, as always, when this was never an open source project.
2 replies →
AMD is not a good company. They stopped innovating after Intel was put down. Except, now Intel has govt backing while AMD will face significantly more competition from not only x86 but arm. Stock price says otherwise but I think they had more than enough time to catch up to Nvidia and simply refused to compete.