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
Answering the actual question seems not a high priority
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.
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.
It wouldn't surprise me if AMD is scaling back their free offerings due to the impact on support.
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.
AMD is clearly just putting on a performance here though, using the backlash they get as a weapon.
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.
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)"
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.
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?!
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.
AMD’s MBA types extinguish that early mindshare at their own peril.
It does make me wonder how much money they must be losing on these chips that they've turned this desperate for licensing costs.
- A regular tactic used by our former autocratic ruler, or most corrupted people
> 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.
Many HNers promised to pay if developers bring their software to Linux - will that actually happen?
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.
Because people haven't offered enough money to have a copy privately shared. This is on the Linux community for not ponying up enough money to fund this properly to have a reasonable release date.
This is just hurting students and hobbyists.
I'm not rewarding that. I'll reward companies like Valve instead.
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)
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.
Sometime after the heat death of the universe, maybe. IME raising prices during development is their modus operandi.
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.
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.
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?)
Windows cannot provide feature parity for workloads that require cross compiling, AMD could at least support RHEL like the old days.
They do still support Linux... but only if you give them money.
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.
There are also free Linux versions of Lattice Diamond, Gowin EDA and Efinix's Efinity software.
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 want a robust open-source ecosystem where anyone can take my hardware projects and modify them without needing to deal with licensing friction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is always someone paying. Linux should be no different.