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.
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.
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.;-)
God speed if you can get something a lot better for a lot cheaper.
"AMD never misses a chance to miss a chance."
In this case, the chance to trash its reputation with customers.
Hardware vendors lost the plot in the Winmodem era.
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?
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
Consoles are always pressured to minimize upfront purchase costs, and they generally replace the vendor-provider SW stack with their own anyways.
Actually looking at this thread, there’s a lot of good reasons they were the go-tos for consoles. Consoles seem to be in rough shape at the moment, I wonder if part of that is that AMD has been doing too well since Zen, haha.
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.
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.
(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.)
Baseless speculation
> probably is somewhat of a loss leader for small-batch users
Wrong. AMD/Xilinx doesn't sell devices directly to customers, they sell them to distributors in huge quantities. Those distributors then sell them to "small-batch users", and they're not involved with AMD/Xilinx free-tier software at all.
> they’re running at around -10% profit on small sales to try and drive subscription revenue multipliers
More baseless speculation
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.
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.
I wonder how many Linux GPU sales their decision to penalize Linux on their FPGA line will cost them.
Not many I would guess.
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.
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.
It seems silly to put up SW barriers for people to use your fairly expensive HW, but what do I know.
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...
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.
This is an absolute foot-gun moment. And the gaslighting PR responses are just unacceptable. I'm very disappointed in them.
AMD just does not see the world this way.
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...
A lot of the serious CUDA compute stuff is also not supported on all platforms (it's linux only, because why would you do such stuff on windows).
Link to my comment, so that I don't repeat myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256417
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?
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?
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.
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?
Quote: 'The only source I can give at this time is "trust me bro"'
(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
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.
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.
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.
Also my understanding of many Asian cultures is they tend to have a much more tight-knit large family structure. And doubling that is the fact they're 2 heads of world-level hardware tech companies.
And, well, there's no such thing as coincidences. Having all of this line up, and for "some reason" AMD keeps missing when they could have owned a big chunk of the market has a certain family oligopoly smell to me.
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 just can't see that cost of having a free Linux version (on top having a paid Linux version) is big?
And for those who forget RHEL for instance has to pay salaries to back port fixes and such and the same logic applies here.
There's no bait and switch. It's just people expecting things for free, as always, when this was never an open source project.
In Vivado, it's the same release for the free and expensive builds on both Linux and Windows. It's just a question of the installed license file/license limits.
> such as the Linux builds require proprietary 3rd party code with royalties, and they chose not to eat that cost.
This seems unlikely for a multitude of reasons.