Comment by wewewedxfgdf
6 hours ago
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.
6 hours ago
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.
is there any hope for someone to become a professional in the field without an electronic/computer engineering degree? I'd love to do stuff that I can actually hold in my hand (did some reverse engineering for a usb sound card and it felt rewarding cause I could quite literally hear the success), but I only have a computer science adjacent degree (BBa in Business Information Technology).
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Given how many idiotic ideas are ‘patched’ or worked around in software, it’s probably pretty easy. Especially in the world of modern GPUs when only a handful of people at the factory are able to write drivers for it.
Hardware vendors lost the plot in the Winmodem era.
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Should be the first of the two chances for the phrase to work.
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?
AMD also had the strongest offering for GPU and CPU using the same memory with the same address space. That allows you to switch between CPU and GPU processing for the same data, without paying the cost of moving the data to and from the GPU. Similar to what we now have on Apple silicon
They tried to push the same into the desktop market with their APUs, where it was mostly ignored. But console games only target a couple hardware configurations, making it viable to take advantage of such hardware features
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You’re approaching this as if every company had the same corporate intentions.
Nvidia never cared much for those types of deals. They preferred to lose Apple as a business than to admit fault, they’ve always refused to compete on price for the business of Sony and Microsoft’s consoles. They’re adamant to beat at the sound of their own drum.
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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.
Hardware isn’t where the margins are, and probably is somewhat of a loss leader for small-batch users; for hobby users I would hazard a guess that they’re running at around -10% profit on small sales to try and drive subscription revenue multipliers, and for already-paying users this change is essentially irrelevant and will have zero downside impact on sub revenue. Terrible way to run a profitable business if you fuck up the hardware undercut, but if you can get away with it, subscriptions are certainly a valid answer to maintenance of the platform over time. I still think they didn’t go far enough to make a meaningful dent in conversions from free to paying, though.
(Note that mention of Steam Linux is not about the games aspect, but about the Valve’s seeming plans to become a competitive target for Linux support to the exclusion of other consumer-focused miscellaneity. But I tend to go on about this too often, and shouldn’t have invoked it here, apologies.)
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