The official replies are addressing questions that nobody has asked. The main issue is why Linux support is being removed from the Basic tier while Windows is still allowed.
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.
The official replies started off by addressing ... the "unacceptable abusive behavior towards AMD". The most important thing here is obviously to ask people not to use such hurtful words as "disgraceful" towards poor little AMD...
Answering the actual question seems not a high priority
Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset? Especially when to company has just announced changes that limit what users can do with their products.
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.
> Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset?
I’m actually fully in favor of empowering customer-facing representatives to put reasonable limits on responding to customer abuse.
It should not be the job of a forum moderator to take abuse. Warning them about the rules of the forum and then enforcing the rules is forum management 101. It’s getting silly that people are attacking this person specifically for just doing their job.
Whether it's directed at you or not, as an employee it's still stressful AF and these people are like getting paid kinda shit wages to put up with people all day long.
I'm not arguing about whether or not this particular instance contained "uncivil comments" (do the mods have the ability there to delete the comments if they are uncivil?)...
But day in day out, on a mass level, it's such a goddamned drag, even if it isn't directed at you, it's energy and emotional bullshit. Every job has it, sometimes it's your boss or shit coworkers... But customer facing is such an awful position for the wages they usually make. Even if it's "good" wages. Even if they don't primarily face the public, but still have to engage in a secondary support role.
I can't imagine what it's like to deal with this as a job when you're on the front line with an angry mob coming at you.
Again on this particular case I'm making no judgement, but it IS a stressor, regardless if directed at you, or not.
Especially in a high volume environment that probably has more incoming vectors of commentary/attack/vitriol than just the single comment thread.
If you want my opinion I think what these mods said had nothing to do with the stress of the environment, they’re just following something of a community moderator trope where they maybe aren’t even employees and at all but enjoy the authority of moderation.
They have no authority or knowledge of the topic at hand at all but can’t resist weighing in and throwing authority around.
You know, it used to be "The customer is always right".
But it's become "Whaat? Are you talking to us you uncivilized, stinky hippy peons? How dare you? We serve only the rich corps now, we don't care about you or your money."
> But customer facing is such an awful position for the wages they usually make.
So you're saying that rich AMD doesn't pay their employees enough and for this reason, their unsatisfied customers should be careful not to say bad things about the company to the employees mistreated by that same company... There are too many logical errors here to describe in a short comment.
When a company screws over entire segments of their customers people get angry. And they don’t get less angry when their frustration is belittled by someone how essentially says “your dissatisfaction means less to us than the words you choose to describe it”.
I don’t want to register for this forum and I’m having trouble finding any kind of a sort. But are you referring to this comment?
* First, any bad language or abusive behaviour towards AMD, is not acceptable. If continued, we will proceed to block your profiles altogether.
If you are not happy with the new tier licensing flow, no one is stopping users (Students etc) to continue using the current versions of Vivado (any Vivado version prior 2026.1) and develop using free Vivado ML Standard Edition.*
If so, I have a different take on this. It could have been worded better, but I don’t think Anatoli is a native English speaker. Based upon a reply to @mkru, I also don’t think they have much visibility into marketing or if they do, they’re not very interested.
* For your specific question: Why is Linux not supported in the BASIC tier?
This is AMD's marketing decision.*
None of this is great, but English isn’t the easiest language to learn and de-escalation involves a specific speech pattern. And of everything they said in the answers I’ve found, ‘this is AMD’s marketing decision’ is the most blunt. Everything else has more information attached except for the little takedown at the beginning.
I know that’s a lot of words to say that I think belittling is a little strong. But brevity is a juicy topic… :)
Communication is tricky because it isn’t just about the words, but how they land. On the surface it may not seem like belittling someone’s pain. In reality this is exactly what it feels like for those on the receiving end. It also doesn’t help that it was delivered with a threat of expulsion. It communicates:
- we don’t care about your pain
- those in charge find it below their dignity to explain the decision to you
- we don’t feel we owe you an explanation, but we’ll take your license fees
- we care more about how you say things than what you say
- you are helpless and we can take away your voice (here) if we want to
Now, the problem isn’t just that some people are not native English speakers — quite a few in our industry come across as not being able to “speak human”. Which makes us prone to put more emphasis on words than how different people in different states of mind read those words.
> Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset
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.
> have a message saying that they will hang up on you if you act pissy.
When I had some influence over customer support at a company once I set a similar expectation. We didn’t advertise it up front but if a customer was being abusive over support channels they could be cut off.
Big morale boost for customer support. Abusive customers are rare but they can think it’s their job to attack, threaten, and be uncivil. Being stuck in a position where you’re forced to placate angry man-children sucks.
It’s sad that there are so many comments here trying to attack the forum moderator for moderating the forum.
This person had no hand in the decision making. No reason to treat them as an outlet for anger.
Seems we have an awful lot of snowflakes in the corporate tech world the last couple years. Can’t take criticism, can’t handle basic questioning of their operation …
That is why techbros cannot make it in politics. I was actually impressed with Zuckerberg: he knows how to wear a suit and did not crumble when EU parliamentarians questioned him.
Yeah that was hilarious, pretty much instantly closed the tab when I read that.
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?!
> Answering the actual question seems not a high priority
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.
Some people, including the management of most big corporations, claim that verbal insults, which do no actual physical harm to anyone, are "unacceptable abusive behavior", while the actions that do physical harm to others, e.g. by tricking or forcing them to pay an extra part of their hard-earned money for things that should not have been paid, because they had already been paid in another form, instead of using that money for worthy purposes, are not "unacceptable abusive behavior".
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.
I agree with your point (that AMD does a lot more harm than what they are indignant about) but not the way you go there. If emotional abusive behavior is not "physical harm" because it's just emotions, then financial abusive behavior is not "physical harm" either because it's just numbers. When you consider what incredible harm being emotionally unwell can lead to, I don't think it deserves to be dismissed.
AMD is clearly just putting on a performance here though, using the backlash they get as a weapon.
Yea insulting and being verbally abusive towards individuals is something that it's worth taking action against. My problem with AMD's response is simply that they take issue with "bad language or abusive behavior towards AMD".
It would be more accurate to say that what AMD is doing is causing material harm, while a few mean words directed towards an anonymous megacorp are not.
The replies here are horrifying. Yes corporations are not people. But they are made up of people. I'd imagine most here work in them yourselves. Often less well paid support staff who have to read, and try to respond, to such terrible behavior. As one of those support people myself I can assure you it takes a toll.
Do you genuinely think that support staff reads "this decision made by AMD is disgraceful" and feel personally attacked because they identify as "part of AMD" and therefore an attack on AMD's honor is an attack on theirs?
Don't get me wrong, support staff often gets abuse thrown their way in a way that is absolutely not okay. There's a lot of people out there who
get angry at the support personale. That's not what we're talking about here. Support staff needs thick enough skin to hear, "AMD did something bad" and not take it personally.
AMD is not a person. It has no emotions. Any perceived emotional harm by humans is them projecting themselves onto the AMD entity. Whereas AMDs actions here cause real harm to individuals.
AMD and any other corpo is made of people, who do have emotions. Abuse towards these people impacts corp operations. This is an entity protecting itself from damage that it feels is not worth the benefit the offering would bring.
And I question your assertion of real harm to individuals, by not offering free support, being worse than receiving verbal abuse.
Right, but saying "this policy change is disgraceful" and saying "you, customer support person, are an insufferable dickhead" are very different things. From what I can see in the link comments, people seem to be saying mostly the former.
Was the abuse and response directed at a person or AMD? Even AMDs response is vague and deflects it as “Abuse towards AMD”
AMD is free to change their terms of their product, but then characterizing the backlash as abuse towards AMD is laughable. Have empathy for people not corporations
Its just numbers only for rich. For poor ir can be the differnce between employability and not. In general, I believe that non-free tools like this are effective violence against poor nations since they trap those societies in unskilled sectors.
There are still individuals, who make up the company, who have to read and try to formulate responses to said abusive behavior. It's usually the lower paid support staff not the engineers or C suite who have those duties. As one of those people I can confirm it absolutely takes a toll.
Nah, feel free to insult any company I have worked for or even the company that I am one of the founders of. I don't see why that should be off limits. But do not insult me as a person.
Probably a good thing I don't run a company, because I wouldn't put energy into responding to the kind of comments they're addressing. If you use a support channel the same way a teenager uses Reddit, you should count to ten and try again later.
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)"
You're kind of doing the job for them here by inventing a connection between Linux and "simple, entry-level needs". Plenty of Linux users have "simple, entry-level needs"; nothing about using Windows automatically makes you needs simpler. If that is indeed their argument, they ought to have spelled it out.
> In other words, they're saying hobbyists and beginners are on Windows anyway
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.
When they do not have any justifiable answer, or don't want to answer, but need to keep the facade on, they'll sidestep and tell you how hard they are working on something, and how many unrelated things they've archived.
- A regular tactic used by our former autocratic ruler, or most corrupted people
I think many haven't read that part, as it is hidden by default and one have to expand the answer to see it. At least that was what happened to me... I didn't noticed it until you pointed it out.
a.k.a. Just use a microcontroller. And for the vast majority of hobby projects I suspect that is good advice. Low end FPGAs don't compete well with low end microcontrollers and more people know how to use microcontrollers.
I think the reality is the niche that FPGAs occupied is getting hit hard on the high and low end. Cheap Chinese FPGAs are prevalent, cheap microcontrollers more so, and on the high-end making an ASIC that compete with a high-end FPGA has never been cheaper, and is getting cheaper and easier everyday. 65-28nm is very easy to use now (relatively speaking) and is very low cost with tons of tape outs and there is good competition. Beating an FPGA with an ASIC is not all that hard. Grad students at CMU, Stanford, Georgia Tech, etc. do it all the time in their tape-out class. Making an ASIC is not as easy as an FPGA for sure, especially if you need DDR and serdes. And NRE for ASICs for small volume ( <1K units) is higher. But it is getting easier and cheaper everyday. And it's now feasible for small teams (say ~6) to do it. I think they need to look very hard at where they spend their NRE now to stay relevant and they need to start getting brutal because I am sure the amount of revenue they're bringing in is under serious attack.
As to why Windows and not Linux? It's probably cheaper for them to maintain Windows for one reason or another. Maybe they don't even do it an just contract it out and Windows contractors are easier to find, but I'll bet it's just a basic cost issue at the end of the day.
Are you seriously suggesting hobbyists should tapeout an ASIC instead of use an FPGA?
1. For one-off designs (quantity=1) ASICs will never beat a high end FPGA on unit price.
2. As a hobbyist, you want to EXPERIMENT. You cannot do that with an ASIC. Hobbyists want to do something simple, test it on real hardware, and slowly build up from that. I don't have the time nor expertise nor motivation to spend months writing verification to get it right the first time for a tapeout.
"Just use a microcontroller"... I will concede that microcontrollers do cover 90% of hobbyists use cases (that number increasing by the day). But for hobbyists sometimes you want to learn HDL or digital logic or computer engineering. You can do this hands on with a FPGA much more effectively than in software.
> It's probably cheaper for them to maintain Windows for one reason or another.
They already need to maintain the Linux build for all the other paid tiers?? These are the same software with different features locked behind a license key. It costs them NOTHING to keep the build enabled for free tier.
> Are you seriously suggesting hobbyists should tapeout an ASIC instead of use an FPGA?
No. I said the low-end of FPGA sales is getting eaten by microcontrollers and the high-end of FPGAs sales is probably about to get eaten by custom ASICs.
Although the cost of making an ASIC is high, in the larger nodes it's not that high, and getting ever cheaper at FPGA performance levels and logic densities. FPGAs are terribly inefficient with their HW they're very easy to beat with an ASIC. They only get away with it because the NRE today is lower. But it's not an order of magnitude lower and I'm not sure how much longer that will be the case in nodes at 28nm and larger based on what I know Universities pay in tape-out classes.
Will there be very low qty projects where the NRE of developing an ASIC overwhelms that of an ASIC, sure. But will there be enough business in that niche to sustain the business of AMD, Intel and Lattice? Not obvious.
And I don't think the FPGA hobbyist market of people who "want to learn HDL" spends enough money to affect what's coming and this decision from AMD reflects that.
> 1. For one-off designs (quantity=1) ASICs will never beat a high end FPGA on unit price.
Never say never. These guys were able to convince investors you're wrong about that. :)
On the other hand - this is now an opportunity for Linux community to show that they are actually able to fund development of software for their platform, right?
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.
>AMD refuse to document the necessary details of their products.
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.
The only reason why the "Linux community" cannot create adequate FPGA design tools is that the "Linux community" is completely inadequate in comparison to what's needed.
Reverse engineering tools are pretty good these days. I have no doubt that a dedicated hacker could sit down with Ghidra and the free Windows version of Vivado for two years and come out with something that compiles FPGAs well enough. But there's a shortage of the kinds of people who would do that, they're all busy doing other things, so it doesn't get done.
More easily, someone could get the free Windows version to run on Linux. If it doesn't already work in Wine, they could figure out and implement the needed Wine patches. If Vivado has a DRM scheme they could break it (potentially very difficult), if not then it should be straightforward. Nobody seems to be doing that, either.
The same applies to things like the Nvidia drivers.
In the past, freedom RE projects were handicapped by needing to maintain a Chinese wall. Now it's become obvious you don't need a Chinese wall, you can just straight up decompile someone else's software and use that as a reference as long as you don't copy it directly and you don't make it too obvious to the copyright owners what you're doing. Keeping your anonymity for this sort of project is easier than ever before too. Yet we see less freedom RE projects, not more. Why is that?
It's a pretty low risk if you don't put your identity out there. I know there's at least one Git forge that's a Tor onion service. Even on GitHub 99% of the time this ends with a DMCA takedown of the repository. You should probably put it on a pseudonymous alt account but you don't actually need to use a Tor onion service.
You could also get someone else to put their name on the web hosting and so on. Don't know who exactly, but there are a lot more people willing to take legal risk of having reverse-engineered an FPGA toolchain, than people who can reverse-engineer an FPGA toolchain. Doing the work is what's most important, and the rest can be figured out later. But you don't even see that. You don't see people being like "I reverse-engineered Vivado but I won't give you a copy because I could get sued."
"Doing the work is what's most important, and the rest can be figured out later."
I would say for most people his means they won't start the work if they don't know whether there is a way. Also most people like to get credit for their work. So the number of people capable AND willing to work without getting credit is low. And that is not surprising to me.
It is not my skill set, but I certainly would not invest much into something like this.
Vivado already supports Linux, the development is supported by very large customers that put FPGAs in cars, [REDACTED], and other kinds of objects that crash into other objects.
AMD has been unable to not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for ages. I'd almost say someone high up is getting kickbacks from their competitors.
As for hobbyists, in the world of $0.03 microcontrollers, strong competition on the low end from Chinese manufacturers, and where few people learn HDLs, is NRE money in the hobby market really money well spent?
I'm a HW designer and even I use microcontrollers now for most things, but not everything, because it's usually cheaper and faster.
With semiconductor prices coming down as far as they have I think the world has probably fundamentally changed for FPGAs and the niche they occupied is shrinking fast.
It took a small company I worked for months to get new licenses due to AMD just not responding. I'm not sure they have the ability to actually handle this in a timely manner
I’ve spent several hundred thousand on Xilinx FPGAs yet they nickel and dime me for licenses. It’s not the cost that’s a problem—-it’s the hassle of making a PO for a license to set up new computers, set up CI, hiring new teammates, setting up for interns/students. Xilinx has continued to go downhill since their acquisition by AMD.. it used to feel like it was run by engineers who understood their customers, now it seems to be getting taken over by the MBA crowd who only understands pinching pennies and chiseling their own loyal customers
Yep. Strategy Letter V by Joel Spolsky (2002): "Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements". Also, from the 2004's "How Microsoft Lost the API War":
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.
Although it also means Windows could rely on Intel so long for compiler tools, that when I was trying to build for ARM customers, I realized a lot of the expected developer tools are just barely functional or don’t exist (ifort, MKL, gdb, mingw, etc)
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.
We've had good experiences with Lattice parts. Their software tools are free for all of their basic chips. They only charge for licensing when you use the higher end SKUs with SerDes. Example, you can use and develop on an ECP5 or Certus using their free license, but then you need a paid license to work on ECP5-5G or CertusPro chips.
They're not perfect, but they're better to work with than Xilinx. Also, their datasheetd are better than Xilinx in my experience.
FWIW I'm using Yosis for my Ice40 Lattice FPGA purely because their Linux support is bad.
Getting a free hobby license requires emailing them with MAC addresses (which means I have to do that for my desktop, laptop, and again for any future machine I may get). Then getting the tools to actually run on Linux seemed to be impossible that I just gave up.
It's not clear that I have the Yosys and open source options for my Xilinx based fpgas.
I came in here to recommend Lattice as well, at least for small glue-logic type applications. I've used their various MaxhXO lines extensively and really enjoy working with them.
Eh... unfortunately they shut down their forums a couple of years ago. So good luck getting any form of support as a free user even if you run into real bugs in their software (believe me, I tried...)
That being said, I have used their ice40 and ECP5 FPGAs with Yosys for a couple of small projects and that worked perfectly fine.
I have, and compared to just running Linux it's not very good. For starters, the shared filesystem is incredibly slow, there is no hardware passthrough support out of the box (even for USB), the graphics support is incomplete and there's lots of non-standard defaults like custom kernel images and a custom init. That's on top of all the bugs and horrible error reporting.
It still beats Windows, but given the choice, I'd much rather just use Linux properly and have all of this just work than waste my time fiddling with WSL/WSL2.
The open source community has hijacked VBox drivers to get USB pass through working and is the official solution from Microsoft to that problem (since it requires a signed driver on the host, and RedHat was authorized to sign drivers, so Microsoft can provide their drivers to work around the signing requirements of the OS)
It feels like bean counter logic. They have a development budget with x% towards linux support which is not enough to fully support linux, so they want linux users to pay to help fund the development. It makes sense in some ways, but I would think the entire software suite would be a loss leader to sell hardware. Less barriers to entry and all that.
except their tools are all the linux ecosystem compiled to windows... it is all gcc based and their tutorials recommends those terminals that mimick Unix. it smells stupid managers + microsoft interference.
As a long time Altera user, one of the biggest things that made me want to jump the fence to Xilinx was the MUCH stronger community and hobbyist uptake. Xilinx benefitted from a ton of people out there educating others on their behalf.
Trying to shrink that community seems like a pretty obvious error. The closest thing the Altera world ever had were the old Altera user forums, which were a gold-mine. Intel shut them down immediately on acquisition. I guess it's AMD's turn.
This sucks. I was working on a video course on building CPUs on an FPGA that uses Vivado (because I am somewhat familiar with the ecosystem and have dev boards with Artix FPGAs).
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?)
For teaching / learning it's hard to beat Quartus Prime Lite - the virtual JTAG infrastructure (for SignalTap logic analyzer) is much better than the other options. (It's easy to create custom virtual JTAG modules to control and read data from a running design, and these will happily coexist with the logic analyzer.)
Dev board wise QMTech on AliExpress have some really nice entry-level dev boards - the Cyclone 10CL025 board, the daughter board and a clone USB-Blaster cable for programming would weigh in at well under £100.
Terasic have a bunch of different Intel/Altera dev boards, the cheapest being the DE0-Nano - personally I like the DE10-lite, but there are more modern options for those with deeper pockets.
The Tang Nano 20k is a solid and affordable choice for a Gowin chip (though be aware that this particular chip's PLLs are a bit limited and its block RAMs don't have byte enables). The JTAG stuff works but isn't anywhere near as advanced as Intel's.
For Lattice ECP5 there are several options - and these chips are well-supported by yosys/nextpnr and oss-cad-suite in general.
I quite like the IceSugar-Pro ECP5-based board and associated breakout board - but it has a quirky built-in JTAG adapter which isn't supported by the Lattice toolchain, so you'll have to use OpenOCD or OpenFPGALoader to program it, and you can't use the vendor-supplied internal logic analyzer. Its FPGA is well supported by oss-cad-suite, though, which is a big plus.
IcePi-Zero is also well worth considering, available from CrowdSupply.
ULX3S is very nice, too - but as far as I can see it's only available for pre-order on the next production run.
Thank you for your reply! I did a bit of research and, since I do want to use quite some peripherals, I have gone for the ULX3S. A big factor here was documentation and availability; If I would have been able to find a MiSTer Pi I might have gone for that instead.
I now bought a ULX3S on a whim, and will at least evaluate how usable it is for my purposes. It will take quite some time to familiarize myself with a new toolchain, which kinda sucks. One advantage of these big proprietary IDEs is that they integrate a lot of functionality into one "unit" (as far as the user/programmer is concerned), instead of having to install a lot of separate tools.
For the course, I am now considering to "support" an AMD board, an Intel one, and a Lattice one.
oss-cad-suite will give you the open source toolchain for ULX3S in one convenient package.
There are plenty of example projects and other resources, plus a discord server. https://ulx3s.github.io/
(Also, to download Lattice Diamond you'll need to make an account on the Lattice website which then needs to be activated. I tried that using a gmail account, and it was never activated - I had to use an email address related to one of my own domains.)
There is a ridiculous amount of flagging here. Every comment that says the Linux community gets to show its stuff by doing the work themselves gets flagged. That is no bueno. I've already vouched for several.
Dropping Linux support on the free tier feels like a huge step backward for hobbyists and students. So many academic and open source FPGA workflows rely entirely on Linux environments.
So does Quartus Prime Pro - and for specific Agilex 5 devices it's also free.
(Presumably it was too much trouble to backport support for Agilex to the Lite version.)
There are also free Linux versions of Lattice Diamond, Gowin EDA and Efinix's Efinity software.
It's really unfortunate that FPGA development is still stuck in the 90s. The incentives between IP owners and hobbyists are so misaligned that I don't see the possibility of this ever improving.
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 agree. Once upon a time I was quite interested in FPGAs but the infrastructure being so uninviting in general made me move on completely. I was somewhat recently involved in quantizing neural networks with FINN (AMD) and let's just say...that was a pretty bad experience overall.
Yes, same here. Did my thesis on reconfigurable co-processors in the 00s, then quickly moved away from that market due to the atrocious tooling availability and OS support once I was no longer a student.
Trying to read between the lines, here are my lazy sunday morning guesses at what might be going on here:
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.
Would be fun if Linux had some fight in it and turned off support for AMD chips.
One day held the world’s data centers are crashed and the next day we find the AMD C-suite has all resigned and all the leadership of the FPGA division. But it’s not enough now, to get Linux support back they have to make Vivado Linux exclusive and free at all levels.
So obviously none of this is realistic, even the foundations of it don't align with reality, so what point are you trying to make with this comment? I'm afraid it's going over my head.
AMD is acting like French Aristocracy and they’re telling Linux users to eat cake. It’d be nice if there was digital infrastructure and social will to metaphorically take their heads.
The difficult part is the place and route algorithm, not the bitstream. The proprietary ones already take quite a long time to solve: I regularly have 12-24h runs. Perhaps an open source one could do better? But it's not quite as straightforward as reverse engineering a proprietary bitstream.
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.
Nextpnr and Project X-Ray are amazing projects. Reverse engineering the physical map of, say, a 7-series FPGA is no small feat. However, I wonder if they'll ever be able to really compete with Vivado without getting access to the characterization models for timing. I would love to switch over, but the Fmax of my project routed with nextpnr is less than half of what I get with Vivado.
When I first started doing chip design my boss paid more for tools per year than he paid me ... now days open source tool chains are leaping ahead ... I don't need a boss (or VCs) in order to design chips
I have to admit that I haven't looked too closely into this but my understanding is that place & route is essentially an NP hard optimization problem. Would it be possible to translate this into a SAT problem and solve it with a state of the art SAT solver?
It's surely possible but if it's, for example, 10% slower, that easily eats into execution time and that directly translates into a sense of "maybe it's just worth it to pay the license fee for this year" after just a few 20h place and route runs.
Of course, if it were faster, that would be a huge win for the open source implementation.
For reverse engineering, you still need access to the FPGA tools provided by the vendor, to see what changes in the bitstream when you change the design.
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.
I wonder if they will come to their senses and revert the decision? It does seem a bit boneheaded to drop Linux support on the Basic tier... What actual reason would they need to do that?
Software distribution for Linux can be hard. Many distros, different conventions, no FHS is long forgotten, ...
However, Xilinx Vivado and Vitis are so obtusely distributed, making it incredibly hard to package them well.
Three random issues I remember:
1. We had a lot of trouble with Vivado projects randomly breaking. The culprit: German localization combined with automatic clock frequency derivation. Depending on which logic blocks where wired up how, you would get i.e. 99.999 MHz instead of 100 MHz. Apparently, Vivado uses a localized printf (or equivalent) to generate TCL scripts. In German localization, the decimal is a comma, which is interpreted as additional argument in the TCL scripts.
2. For simulation, scripts scripts are copied from a template folder to the user folder, and subsequently adjusted. They are copied in archive mode. If the template is read-only to the current user, so is the new copy, thus failing the subsequent adjustment.
3. If you run the installer with --help as argument, it pops up an X window displaying the help. In general, IIRC, we need to run a headless X just to run the installer in CLI/batch mode.
From a Linux distro maintainer perspective, the packaging is horrible. In particular separation of base installation, configuration, and add-ons is non-existent. Large amount of vendored dependencies, only then to depend on the most minute little packages that Ubuntu supposedly ships.
Setting up a reliable, reproducible CI/CD environment based on Vivado is a large headache.
That all goes to say: if anything, AMD/Xilinx should be paying its customers to deal with this. Unless there is a major improvement in the software distribution practices for Linux, I could not justify to my employer paying money for this experience.
On the other hand, if they commercialize on Linux support, there is soooo much that they can improve by a lot, who knows. Hope dies last and all.
Doesn't help that just to start out you are looking at a 110+ GB size for their tools, which as far as anyone can tell, isn't really justified by anything.
That's because in the EDA space, they have horrible software practices. Take the worst you can imagine and then go worse from there. So eventually, when things "appear to work" they end up taking a snapshot of a messy directory and calling that the deliverable asset.
Just a random rant: I used to do FPGA work for a living, and I remember Xilinx's ISE (Vivado before they renamed it and the company got bought by AMD) was Windows-only, but the first thing that popped up when starting it was a Cygwin window :D
Charging for Vivado has always struck me as ridiculous. It's a software dongle that enables Xilinx hardware, and the hardware is how they make money. Give Vivado away for free and support it on Linux and Mac, and you'll sell 10x as many chips.
1) This could actually be an attempt to gain more revenue from big customers that have users who use the free version to test that code can synthesize and run unit tests (by pretending to use smaller parts), and then only use the paid version for the final integration into the actual larger parts.
2) This could give them more customer data more easily. They make no secret of the fact that the free tiers share data with the mothership for product improvement reasons. Maybe they only want to maintain the infrastructure to do this on Windows, or maybe it's harder for customers to subvert on Windows.
3) There will be people running the Windows version on Linux, and explaining how to do it, in 3... 2... 1...
Are the prices so insane this is actually a viable option instead of just buying a bigger license? I always tell juniors to just submit a request for a licence since it will likely cost far less than retraining them or making them work harder and more to compensate for splitting things up (not FPGA related though).
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.
This Anatoli forum moderator looks like to be quite a very bad user representative.
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.
This is the absolute dumbest decision imaginable. The only people hurt by the removal of free trial software for Linux are students and amateurs.
Even Apple, possibly the greediest company in the world, knows the importance of cheap hardware and free software for students. Because those students and amateurs eventually become pros who make money decisions.
AMD is always so close to pulling ahead of Intel and Nvidia but somehow manage to shoot themselves in the foot constantly...
I can see American companies quickly loose market dominance to Chinese FPGA manufacturers with this short sighted behavior. People don’t realize how big FPGAs are in Asia.
How is it sustainable for AMD to maintain their software on Linux for free? Would you maintain your own Linux software (and its distros) for $0?
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.
> I see no problem with monetizing Linux users. If I am monetizing Windows and macOS users, there should be no exceptions towards 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.
First of all, you already pay for the FPGAs, and the only reason why you pay for them is that they are "Field-Programmable" GAs. To be able to use the product that you own, as advertised, you MUST have the AMD software tools, because they refuse to provide the technical documentation that would allow the use of FPGAs without vendor-provided tools.
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.
How is is sustainable for Apple to maintain MacOS for free? I see not problem with monetizing Mac users by making them pay extra for OS and especially its upgrades.
Some replies complain about the moderator not answering the main question. While this is a valid complaint, it is also likely that they don't know the answer as well. Now, the best reply would be to openly say that they don't have visibility into upper management's decisions. But, at the same time, I think it's possible that the way they're replying has to do with some internal guidelines on how to handle this sort of questions.
My personal thoughts on this is that EDA tooling is quite expensive to license, and I'm sure many people have jailbroken their Linux versions to avoid paying for the higher tiers, as Linux doesn't have as strong anti-tamper/app sandboxing capabilities as the other 2 big OSes.
Not saying I agree or support this decision, but I can see why they chose to do this, and their set of paying customers is quite different from your average piece of software.
If this were Google, they'd have made the whole backend of it cloud only, and required all customers to upload all data to their servers. Obviously this doesn't fly in a lot of industries FPGAs tend to be used in.
163 comments:
The official replies are addressing questions that nobody has asked. The main issue is why Linux support is being removed from the Basic tier while Windows is still allowed.
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
The official replies started off by addressing ... the "unacceptable abusive behavior towards AMD". The most important thing here is obviously to ask people not to use such hurtful words as "disgraceful" towards poor little AMD...
Answering the actual question seems not a high priority
Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset? Especially when to company has just announced changes that limit what users can do with their products.
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.
> Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset?
I’m actually fully in favor of empowering customer-facing representatives to put reasonable limits on responding to customer abuse.
It should not be the job of a forum moderator to take abuse. Warning them about the rules of the forum and then enforcing the rules is forum management 101. It’s getting silly that people are attacking this person specifically for just doing their job.
> I’m actually fully in favor of empowering customer-facing representatives to put reasonable limits on responding to customer abuse.
That's not the question that was asked.
Neither calling a company's actions disgraceful nor anything else in the posts that triggered that official reply were abusive to customer service.
They were very sweary.
I actually support companies who empower their customer facing employees to enforce civility.
It means the company cares more about their employees than sacrificing them in favor of maybe getting a few more sales from angry customers.
I disagree that enforcing civility means that, especially if mkru's comments are considered too uncivil.
There were no uncivil comments in the whole thread.
Also, corporations don’t have feelings. They aren’t people. They are legal structures. No comments made were directed at moderators or employees.
Whether it's directed at you or not, as an employee it's still stressful AF and these people are like getting paid kinda shit wages to put up with people all day long.
I'm not arguing about whether or not this particular instance contained "uncivil comments" (do the mods have the ability there to delete the comments if they are uncivil?)...
But day in day out, on a mass level, it's such a goddamned drag, even if it isn't directed at you, it's energy and emotional bullshit. Every job has it, sometimes it's your boss or shit coworkers... But customer facing is such an awful position for the wages they usually make. Even if it's "good" wages. Even if they don't primarily face the public, but still have to engage in a secondary support role. I can't imagine what it's like to deal with this as a job when you're on the front line with an angry mob coming at you.
Again on this particular case I'm making no judgement, but it IS a stressor, regardless if directed at you, or not.
Especially in a high volume environment that probably has more incoming vectors of commentary/attack/vitriol than just the single comment thread.
If you want my opinion I think what these mods said had nothing to do with the stress of the environment, they’re just following something of a community moderator trope where they maybe aren’t even employees and at all but enjoy the authority of moderation.
They have no authority or knowledge of the topic at hand at all but can’t resist weighing in and throwing authority around.
You know, it used to be "The customer is always right".
But it's become "Whaat? Are you talking to us you uncivilized, stinky hippy peons? How dare you? We serve only the rich corps now, we don't care about you or your money."
> But customer facing is such an awful position for the wages they usually make.
So you're saying that rich AMD doesn't pay their employees enough and for this reason, their unsatisfied customers should be careful not to say bad things about the company to the employees mistreated by that same company... There are too many logical errors here to describe in a short comment.
When a company screws over entire segments of their customers people get angry. And they don’t get less angry when their frustration is belittled by someone how essentially says “your dissatisfaction means less to us than the words you choose to describe it”.
_Professionals_ de-escalate. This was not that.
I don’t want to register for this forum and I’m having trouble finding any kind of a sort. But are you referring to this comment?
* First, any bad language or abusive behaviour towards AMD, is not acceptable. If continued, we will proceed to block your profiles altogether.
If you are not happy with the new tier licensing flow, no one is stopping users (Students etc) to continue using the current versions of Vivado (any Vivado version prior 2026.1) and develop using free Vivado ML Standard Edition.*
If so, I have a different take on this. It could have been worded better, but I don’t think Anatoli is a native English speaker. Based upon a reply to @mkru, I also don’t think they have much visibility into marketing or if they do, they’re not very interested.
* For your specific question: Why is Linux not supported in the BASIC tier?
This is AMD's marketing decision.*
None of this is great, but English isn’t the easiest language to learn and de-escalation involves a specific speech pattern. And of everything they said in the answers I’ve found, ‘this is AMD’s marketing decision’ is the most blunt. Everything else has more information attached except for the little takedown at the beginning.
I know that’s a lot of words to say that I think belittling is a little strong. But brevity is a juicy topic… :)
Communication is tricky because it isn’t just about the words, but how they land. On the surface it may not seem like belittling someone’s pain. In reality this is exactly what it feels like for those on the receiving end. It also doesn’t help that it was delivered with a threat of expulsion. It communicates:
- we don’t care about your pain - those in charge find it below their dignity to explain the decision to you - we don’t feel we owe you an explanation, but we’ll take your license fees - we care more about how you say things than what you say - you are helpless and we can take away your voice (here) if we want to
Now, the problem isn’t just that some people are not native English speakers — quite a few in our industry come across as not being able to “speak human”. Which makes us prone to put more emphasis on words than how different people in different states of mind read those words.
> Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset
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.
> have a message saying that they will hang up on you if you act pissy.
When I had some influence over customer support at a company once I set a similar expectation. We didn’t advertise it up front but if a customer was being abusive over support channels they could be cut off.
Big morale boost for customer support. Abusive customers are rare but they can think it’s their job to attack, threaten, and be uncivil. Being stuck in a position where you’re forced to placate angry man-children sucks.
It’s sad that there are so many comments here trying to attack the forum moderator for moderating the forum.
This person had no hand in the decision making. No reason to treat them as an outlet for anger.
Was the anger directed at the moderator?
Seems we have an awful lot of snowflakes in the corporate tech world the last couple years. Can’t take criticism, can’t handle basic questioning of their operation …
That is why techbros cannot make it in politics. I was actually impressed with Zuckerberg: he knows how to wear a suit and did not crumble when EU parliamentarians questioned him.
Yeah that was hilarious, pretty much instantly closed the tab when I read that.
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?!
> Answering the actual question seems not a high priority
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.
Some people, including the management of most big corporations, claim that verbal insults, which do no actual physical harm to anyone, are "unacceptable abusive behavior", while the actions that do physical harm to others, e.g. by tricking or forcing them to pay an extra part of their hard-earned money for things that should not have been paid, because they had already been paid in another form, instead of using that money for worthy purposes, are not "unacceptable abusive behavior".
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.
I agree with your point (that AMD does a lot more harm than what they are indignant about) but not the way you go there. If emotional abusive behavior is not "physical harm" because it's just emotions, then financial abusive behavior is not "physical harm" either because it's just numbers. When you consider what incredible harm being emotionally unwell can lead to, I don't think it deserves to be dismissed.
AMD is clearly just putting on a performance here though, using the backlash they get as a weapon.
Yea insulting and being verbally abusive towards individuals is something that it's worth taking action against. My problem with AMD's response is simply that they take issue with "bad language or abusive behavior towards AMD".
It would be more accurate to say that what AMD is doing is causing material harm, while a few mean words directed towards an anonymous megacorp are not.
The replies here are horrifying. Yes corporations are not people. But they are made up of people. I'd imagine most here work in them yourselves. Often less well paid support staff who have to read, and try to respond, to such terrible behavior. As one of those support people myself I can assure you it takes a toll.
Do you genuinely think that support staff reads "this decision made by AMD is disgraceful" and feel personally attacked because they identify as "part of AMD" and therefore an attack on AMD's honor is an attack on theirs?
Don't get me wrong, support staff often gets abuse thrown their way in a way that is absolutely not okay. There's a lot of people out there who get angry at the support personale. That's not what we're talking about here. Support staff needs thick enough skin to hear, "AMD did something bad" and not take it personally.
AMD is not a person. It has no emotions. Any perceived emotional harm by humans is them projecting themselves onto the AMD entity. Whereas AMDs actions here cause real harm to individuals.
AMD and any other corpo is made of people, who do have emotions. Abuse towards these people impacts corp operations. This is an entity protecting itself from damage that it feels is not worth the benefit the offering would bring.
And I question your assertion of real harm to individuals, by not offering free support, being worse than receiving verbal abuse.
Right, but saying "this policy change is disgraceful" and saying "you, customer support person, are an insufferable dickhead" are very different things. From what I can see in the link comments, people seem to be saying mostly the former.
Was the abuse and response directed at a person or AMD? Even AMDs response is vague and deflects it as “Abuse towards AMD”
AMD is free to change their terms of their product, but then characterizing the backlash as abuse towards AMD is laughable. Have empathy for people not corporations
Its just numbers only for rich. For poor ir can be the differnce between employability and not. In general, I believe that non-free tools like this are effective violence against poor nations since they trap those societies in unskilled sectors.
> claim that verbal insults, which do no actual physical harm to anyone, are "unacceptable abusive behavior"
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.
There are still individuals, who make up the company, who have to read and try to formulate responses to said abusive behavior. It's usually the lower paid support staff not the engineers or C suite who have those duties. As one of those people I can confirm it absolutely takes a toll.
Nah, feel free to insult any company I have worked for or even the company that I am one of the founders of. I don't see why that should be off limits. But do not insult me as a person.
I'll come your place of work and hurl abuse at you all day. Let's see if you find it harmful or not by the end of the week.
I don't know anything about this situation, but basic logic says if you want someone to give you free stuff, be nice to them.
It wouldn't surprise me if AMD is scaling back their free offerings due to the impact on support.
> It wouldn't surprise me if AMD is scaling back their free offerings due to the impact on support.
They’re welcome to hamstring themselves in the market; it’s just not a smart move.
Who are the alternatives to Xilinx on the high end currently? Altera? Lattice and the others make comparatively small FPGAs IIRC.
Probably a good thing I don't run a company, because I wouldn't put energy into responding to the kind of comments they're addressing. If you use a support channel the same way a teenager uses Reddit, you should count to ten and try again later.
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)"
You're kind of doing the job for them here by inventing a connection between Linux and "simple, entry-level needs". Plenty of Linux users have "simple, entry-level needs"; nothing about using Windows automatically makes you needs simpler. If that is indeed their argument, they ought to have spelled it out.
> In other words, they're saying hobbyists and beginners are on Windows anyway
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.
Those students and hobbyists often end up in jobs where they are involved in multi million dollar purchasing decisions.
AMD’s MBA types extinguish that early mindshare at their own peril.
Yeah this is such an own goal. You want students using your code to get them to use it in job. They have learnt nothing from cuda
They still have a system for sponsoring students (through professors). They're not entirely crazy.
It does make me wonder how much money they must be losing on these chips that they've turned this desperate for licensing costs.
Yes, but that’s resistance for potential users they can’t afford if they ever want adoption on the level of CUDA.
When they do not have any justifiable answer, or don't want to answer, but need to keep the facade on, they'll sidestep and tell you how hard they are working on something, and how many unrelated things they've archived.
- A regular tactic used by our former autocratic ruler, or most corrupted people
One would've thought they had learned from their supposed driver superiority over Nvidia due to embracing Linux users with OSS drivers
I guess FPGA division (nee Xilinx, which was always a bit sketchy, even if they had best silicon) doesn't learn much from the GPU division.
> For your specific question: Why is Linux not supported in the BASIC tier?
> 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.
I think many haven't read that part, as it is hidden by default and one have to expand the answer to see it. At least that was what happened to me... I didn't noticed it until you pointed it out.
I don't think AMD can say this but I think the reality is for most hobbyists this is the prevailing attitude:
"The Harsh Truth about FPGAs (You Should Avoid Them?!)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3d8uFKsJiY
a.k.a. Just use a microcontroller. And for the vast majority of hobby projects I suspect that is good advice. Low end FPGAs don't compete well with low end microcontrollers and more people know how to use microcontrollers.
Universities are fine as they can sign up for the University Program and get the licensees they used to get. https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/university-program.html
I think the reality is the niche that FPGAs occupied is getting hit hard on the high and low end. Cheap Chinese FPGAs are prevalent, cheap microcontrollers more so, and on the high-end making an ASIC that compete with a high-end FPGA has never been cheaper, and is getting cheaper and easier everyday. 65-28nm is very easy to use now (relatively speaking) and is very low cost with tons of tape outs and there is good competition. Beating an FPGA with an ASIC is not all that hard. Grad students at CMU, Stanford, Georgia Tech, etc. do it all the time in their tape-out class. Making an ASIC is not as easy as an FPGA for sure, especially if you need DDR and serdes. And NRE for ASICs for small volume ( <1K units) is higher. But it is getting easier and cheaper everyday. And it's now feasible for small teams (say ~6) to do it. I think they need to look very hard at where they spend their NRE now to stay relevant and they need to start getting brutal because I am sure the amount of revenue they're bringing in is under serious attack.
As to why Windows and not Linux? It's probably cheaper for them to maintain Windows for one reason or another. Maybe they don't even do it an just contract it out and Windows contractors are easier to find, but I'll bet it's just a basic cost issue at the end of the day.
Are you seriously suggesting hobbyists should tapeout an ASIC instead of use an FPGA?
1. For one-off designs (quantity=1) ASICs will never beat a high end FPGA on unit price.
2. As a hobbyist, you want to EXPERIMENT. You cannot do that with an ASIC. Hobbyists want to do something simple, test it on real hardware, and slowly build up from that. I don't have the time nor expertise nor motivation to spend months writing verification to get it right the first time for a tapeout.
"Just use a microcontroller"... I will concede that microcontrollers do cover 90% of hobbyists use cases (that number increasing by the day). But for hobbyists sometimes you want to learn HDL or digital logic or computer engineering. You can do this hands on with a FPGA much more effectively than in software.
> It's probably cheaper for them to maintain Windows for one reason or another.
They already need to maintain the Linux build for all the other paid tiers?? These are the same software with different features locked behind a license key. It costs them NOTHING to keep the build enabled for free tier.
> Are you seriously suggesting hobbyists should tapeout an ASIC instead of use an FPGA?
No. I said the low-end of FPGA sales is getting eaten by microcontrollers and the high-end of FPGAs sales is probably about to get eaten by custom ASICs.
Although the cost of making an ASIC is high, in the larger nodes it's not that high, and getting ever cheaper at FPGA performance levels and logic densities. FPGAs are terribly inefficient with their HW they're very easy to beat with an ASIC. They only get away with it because the NRE today is lower. But it's not an order of magnitude lower and I'm not sure how much longer that will be the case in nodes at 28nm and larger based on what I know Universities pay in tape-out classes.
Will there be very low qty projects where the NRE of developing an ASIC overwhelms that of an ASIC, sure. But will there be enough business in that niche to sustain the business of AMD, Intel and Lattice? Not obvious.
And I don't think the FPGA hobbyist market of people who "want to learn HDL" spends enough money to affect what's coming and this decision from AMD reflects that.
> 1. For one-off designs (quantity=1) ASICs will never beat a high end FPGA on unit price.
Never say never. These guys were able to convince investors you're wrong about that. :)
https://atomicsemi.com
P.S. If you're a hobbyist who wants to make an ASIC... https://www.tinytapeout.com
But amd doesn't need you, all they care about is ai. https://youtu.be/uJcf2UGCH1w
On the other hand - this is now an opportunity for Linux community to show that they are actually able to fund development of software for their platform, right?
Many HNers promised to pay if developers bring their software to Linux - will that actually happen?
What you say is ridiculous.
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.
>AMD refuse to document the necessary details of their products.
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.
The only reason why the "Linux community" cannot create adequate FPGA design tools is that the "Linux community" is completely inadequate in comparison to what's needed.
Reverse engineering tools are pretty good these days. I have no doubt that a dedicated hacker could sit down with Ghidra and the free Windows version of Vivado for two years and come out with something that compiles FPGAs well enough. But there's a shortage of the kinds of people who would do that, they're all busy doing other things, so it doesn't get done.
More easily, someone could get the free Windows version to run on Linux. If it doesn't already work in Wine, they could figure out and implement the needed Wine patches. If Vivado has a DRM scheme they could break it (potentially very difficult), if not then it should be straightforward. Nobody seems to be doing that, either.
The same applies to things like the Nvidia drivers.
In the past, freedom RE projects were handicapped by needing to maintain a Chinese wall. Now it's become obvious you don't need a Chinese wall, you can just straight up decompile someone else's software and use that as a reference as long as you don't copy it directly and you don't make it too obvious to the copyright owners what you're doing. Keeping your anonymity for this sort of project is easier than ever before too. Yet we see less freedom RE projects, not more. Why is that?
Because most don't want to work on something big, with a high risk of being sued into oblivion once released?
It's a pretty low risk if you don't put your identity out there. I know there's at least one Git forge that's a Tor onion service. Even on GitHub 99% of the time this ends with a DMCA takedown of the repository. You should probably put it on a pseudonymous alt account but you don't actually need to use a Tor onion service.
You could also get someone else to put their name on the web hosting and so on. Don't know who exactly, but there are a lot more people willing to take legal risk of having reverse-engineered an FPGA toolchain, than people who can reverse-engineer an FPGA toolchain. Doing the work is what's most important, and the rest can be figured out later. But you don't even see that. You don't see people being like "I reverse-engineered Vivado but I won't give you a copy because I could get sued."
"Doing the work is what's most important, and the rest can be figured out later."
I would say for most people his means they won't start the work if they don't know whether there is a way. Also most people like to get credit for their work. So the number of people capable AND willing to work without getting credit is low. And that is not surprising to me.
It is not my skill set, but I certainly would not invest much into something like this.
Vivado already supports Linux, the development is supported by very large customers that put FPGAs in cars, [REDACTED], and other kinds of objects that crash into other objects.
This is just hurting students and hobbyists.
And, since there's a pipeline from students and hobbyists to professional use, it's risking the future.
AMD has been unable to not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for ages. I'd almost say someone high up is getting kickbacks from their competitors.
Schools can join the AMD University Program and get back to where they were, and more. https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/university-program.html
As for hobbyists, in the world of $0.03 microcontrollers, strong competition on the low end from Chinese manufacturers, and where few people learn HDLs, is NRE money in the hobby market really money well spent?
I'm a HW designer and even I use microcontrollers now for most things, but not everything, because it's usually cheaper and faster.
With semiconductor prices coming down as far as they have I think the world has probably fundamentally changed for FPGAs and the niche they occupied is shrinking fast.
And hurting AMD.
Nah. Why do Windows users get it for free while I have to pay because I'm an "advanced" user?
I'm not rewarding that. I'll reward companies like Valve instead.
This tier of the tool is free on Windows.
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)
It took a small company I worked for months to get new licenses due to AMD just not responding. I'm not sure they have the ability to actually handle this in a timely manner
I’ve spent several hundred thousand on Xilinx FPGAs yet they nickel and dime me for licenses. It’s not the cost that’s a problem—-it’s the hassle of making a PO for a license to set up new computers, set up CI, hiring new teammates, setting up for interns/students. Xilinx has continued to go downhill since their acquisition by AMD.. it used to feel like it was run by engineers who understood their customers, now it seems to be getting taken over by the MBA crowd who only understands pinching pennies and chiseling their own loyal customers
Tbh, I think they should just charge for the chips and keep the software free.
Yep. Strategy Letter V by Joel Spolsky (2002): "Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements". Also, from the 2004's "How Microsoft Lost the API War":
Similar logic applies to selling FPGAs.Although it also means Windows could rely on Intel so long for compiler tools, that when I was trying to build for ARM customers, I realized a lot of the expected developer tools are just barely functional or don’t exist (ifort, MKL, gdb, mingw, etc)
This x10000
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.
Microchip also wants money for license to their design suite.
The parts were considering are available under their free tier IIRC
We've had good experiences with Lattice parts. Their software tools are free for all of their basic chips. They only charge for licensing when you use the higher end SKUs with SerDes. Example, you can use and develop on an ECP5 or Certus using their free license, but then you need a paid license to work on ECP5-5G or CertusPro chips.
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.
FWIW I'm using Yosis for my Ice40 Lattice FPGA purely because their Linux support is bad.
Getting a free hobby license requires emailing them with MAC addresses (which means I have to do that for my desktop, laptop, and again for any future machine I may get). Then getting the tools to actually run on Linux seemed to be impossible that I just gave up.
It's not clear that I have the Yosys and open source options for my Xilinx based fpgas.
> 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.
I came in here to recommend Lattice as well, at least for small glue-logic type applications. I've used their various MaxhXO lines extensively and really enjoy working with them.
Eh... unfortunately they shut down their forums a couple of years ago. So good luck getting any form of support as a free user even if you run into real bugs in their software (believe me, I tried...)
That being said, I have used their ice40 and ECP5 FPGAs with Yosys for a couple of small projects and that worked perfectly fine.
I’m working in education and will change to other vendors in the near future. That means all my students will do so as well.
Windows cannot provide feature parity for workloads that require cross compiling, AMD could at least support RHEL like the old days.
Just of out of curiosity, what parts of the University Program don't appeal to you?
https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/university-program.html
You can get free licenses and donated hardware through this program.
Have you tried docker or WSL2. Modern virtualization should make it possible to seamlessly run Linux while in Windows.
I have, and compared to just running Linux it's not very good. For starters, the shared filesystem is incredibly slow, there is no hardware passthrough support out of the box (even for USB), the graphics support is incomplete and there's lots of non-standard defaults like custom kernel images and a custom init. That's on top of all the bugs and horrible error reporting.
It still beats Windows, but given the choice, I'd much rather just use Linux properly and have all of this just work than waste my time fiddling with WSL/WSL2.
The open source community has hijacked VBox drivers to get USB pass through working and is the official solution from Microsoft to that problem (since it requires a signed driver on the host, and RedHat was authorized to sign drivers, so Microsoft can provide their drivers to work around the signing requirements of the OS)
nobody should support MicroSlop
Perhaps an alternative for some applications: https://colognechip.com/programmable-logic/gatemate/
It feels like bean counter logic. They have a development budget with x% towards linux support which is not enough to fully support linux, so they want linux users to pay to help fund the development. It makes sense in some ways, but I would think the entire software suite would be a loss leader to sell hardware. Less barriers to entry and all that.
except their tools are all the linux ecosystem compiled to windows... it is all gcc based and their tutorials recommends those terminals that mimick Unix. it smells stupid managers + microsoft interference.
Link to AMDs description of the new pricing being criticized: https://www.amd.com/en/products/software/adaptive-socs-and-f...
I love the way they buried the “we are no longer supporting an entire operating system” in a small missing tick, half way down the page…
Oh, no, it's sillier than that.
They do still support Linux... but only if you give them money.
This might be a good opportunity for Microsoft to bring back their 'total cost of ownership' advertising campaign.
You don't 2.5x your stock price in two months by underextracting value.
As a long time Altera user, one of the biggest things that made me want to jump the fence to Xilinx was the MUCH stronger community and hobbyist uptake. Xilinx benefitted from a ton of people out there educating others on their behalf.
Trying to shrink that community seems like a pretty obvious error. The closest thing the Altera world ever had were the old Altera user forums, which were a gold-mine. Intel shut them down immediately on acquisition. I guess it's AMD's turn.
This sucks. I was working on a video course on building CPUs on an FPGA that uses Vivado (because I am somewhat familiar with the ecosystem and have dev boards with Artix FPGAs).
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?)
For teaching / learning it's hard to beat Quartus Prime Lite - the virtual JTAG infrastructure (for SignalTap logic analyzer) is much better than the other options. (It's easy to create custom virtual JTAG modules to control and read data from a running design, and these will happily coexist with the logic analyzer.)
Dev board wise QMTech on AliExpress have some really nice entry-level dev boards - the Cyclone 10CL025 board, the daughter board and a clone USB-Blaster cable for programming would weigh in at well under £100.
Terasic have a bunch of different Intel/Altera dev boards, the cheapest being the DE0-Nano - personally I like the DE10-lite, but there are more modern options for those with deeper pockets.
The Tang Nano 20k is a solid and affordable choice for a Gowin chip (though be aware that this particular chip's PLLs are a bit limited and its block RAMs don't have byte enables). The JTAG stuff works but isn't anywhere near as advanced as Intel's.
For Lattice ECP5 there are several options - and these chips are well-supported by yosys/nextpnr and oss-cad-suite in general.
I quite like the IceSugar-Pro ECP5-based board and associated breakout board - but it has a quirky built-in JTAG adapter which isn't supported by the Lattice toolchain, so you'll have to use OpenOCD or OpenFPGALoader to program it, and you can't use the vendor-supplied internal logic analyzer. Its FPGA is well supported by oss-cad-suite, though, which is a big plus.
IcePi-Zero is also well worth considering, available from CrowdSupply.
ULX3S is very nice, too - but as far as I can see it's only available for pre-order on the next production run.
Thank you for your reply! I did a bit of research and, since I do want to use quite some peripherals, I have gone for the ULX3S. A big factor here was documentation and availability; If I would have been able to find a MiSTer Pi I might have gone for that instead.
I now bought a ULX3S on a whim, and will at least evaluate how usable it is for my purposes. It will take quite some time to familiarize myself with a new toolchain, which kinda sucks. One advantage of these big proprietary IDEs is that they integrate a lot of functionality into one "unit" (as far as the user/programmer is concerned), instead of having to install a lot of separate tools.
For the course, I am now considering to "support" an AMD board, an Intel one, and a Lattice one.
Good choice!
oss-cad-suite will give you the open source toolchain for ULX3S in one convenient package. There are plenty of example projects and other resources, plus a discord server. https://ulx3s.github.io/
(Also, to download Lattice Diamond you'll need to make an account on the Lattice website which then needs to be activated. I tried that using a gmail account, and it was never activated - I had to use an email address related to one of my own domains.)
Good news for FOSS FPGA toolchains, I suppose. Eg https://f4pga.org/ for some kind of umbrella project.
There is a ridiculous amount of flagging here. Every comment that says the Linux community gets to show its stuff by doing the work themselves gets flagged. That is no bueno. I've already vouched for several.
Dropping Linux support on the free tier feels like a huge step backward for hobbyists and students. So many academic and open source FPGA workflows rely entirely on Linux environments.
How fortunate that Quartus Prime Lite runs under Linux. Something to keep in mind next time you’re selecting a device for a small project.
So does Quartus Prime Pro - and for specific Agilex 5 devices it's also free. (Presumably it was too much trouble to backport support for Agilex to the Lite version.)
There are also free Linux versions of Lattice Diamond, Gowin EDA and Efinix's Efinity software.
It's really unfortunate that FPGA development is still stuck in the 90s. The incentives between IP owners and hobbyists are so misaligned that I don't see the possibility of this ever improving.
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 agree. Once upon a time I was quite interested in FPGAs but the infrastructure being so uninviting in general made me move on completely. I was somewhat recently involved in quantizing neural networks with FINN (AMD) and let's just say...that was a pretty bad experience overall.
Yes, same here. Did my thesis on reconfigurable co-processors in the 00s, then quickly moved away from that market due to the atrocious tooling availability and OS support once I was no longer a student.
No one seems to have mentioned the obvious question: Does Vivado already run under WINE? If not, are there any major blockers?
Even if it did, the Windows version is vastly inferior to the Linux version with regards to multithreading and other capabilities.
Trying to read between the lines, here are my lazy sunday morning guesses at what might be going on here:
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.
Would be fun if Linux had some fight in it and turned off support for AMD chips.
One day held the world’s data centers are crashed and the next day we find the AMD C-suite has all resigned and all the leadership of the FPGA division. But it’s not enough now, to get Linux support back they have to make Vivado Linux exclusive and free at all levels.
This is the comment that should be [flagged] [dead] instead of all the ones saying why doesn't the Linux community step up...
So obviously none of this is realistic, even the foundations of it don't align with reality, so what point are you trying to make with this comment? I'm afraid it's going over my head.
AMD is acting like French Aristocracy and they’re telling Linux users to eat cake. It’d be nice if there was digital infrastructure and social will to metaphorically take their heads.
For all its faults, you won’t get a rug-pull like this with OSS CAD Suite and something like the ECP5, especially as a hobbyist.
I wonder how good LLM agents are at reverse engineering FPGA bitstreams...
I want a robust open-source ecosystem where anyone can take my hardware projects and modify them without needing to deal with licensing friction.
The difficult part is the place and route algorithm, not the bitstream. The proprietary ones already take quite a long time to solve: I regularly have 12-24h runs. Perhaps an open source one could do better? But it's not quite as straightforward as reverse engineering a proprietary bitstream.
That's why nextpnr exists :)
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.
Nextpnr and Project X-Ray are amazing projects. Reverse engineering the physical map of, say, a 7-series FPGA is no small feat. However, I wonder if they'll ever be able to really compete with Vivado without getting access to the characterization models for timing. I would love to switch over, but the Fmax of my project routed with nextpnr is less than half of what I get with Vivado.
When I first started doing chip design my boss paid more for tools per year than he paid me ... now days open source tool chains are leaping ahead ... I don't need a boss (or VCs) in order to design chips
Somewhere in reverse-engineering-land is the desire to figure out undocumented hardware blocks. I’m not disagreeing about PNR here.
I have to admit that I haven't looked too closely into this but my understanding is that place & route is essentially an NP hard optimization problem. Would it be possible to translate this into a SAT problem and solve it with a state of the art SAT solver?
It's surely possible but if it's, for example, 10% slower, that easily eats into execution time and that directly translates into a sense of "maybe it's just worth it to pay the license fee for this year" after just a few 20h place and route runs.
Of course, if it were faster, that would be a huge win for the open source implementation.
For reverse engineering, you still need access to the FPGA tools provided by the vendor, to see what changes in the bitstream when you change the design.
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.
Amd is gonna murder xilinx like intel did altera
I wonder if they will come to their senses and revert the decision? It does seem a bit boneheaded to drop Linux support on the Basic tier... What actual reason would they need to do that?
Software distribution for Linux can be hard. Many distros, different conventions, no FHS is long forgotten, ...
However, Xilinx Vivado and Vitis are so obtusely distributed, making it incredibly hard to package them well.
Three random issues I remember:
1. We had a lot of trouble with Vivado projects randomly breaking. The culprit: German localization combined with automatic clock frequency derivation. Depending on which logic blocks where wired up how, you would get i.e. 99.999 MHz instead of 100 MHz. Apparently, Vivado uses a localized printf (or equivalent) to generate TCL scripts. In German localization, the decimal is a comma, which is interpreted as additional argument in the TCL scripts. 2. For simulation, scripts scripts are copied from a template folder to the user folder, and subsequently adjusted. They are copied in archive mode. If the template is read-only to the current user, so is the new copy, thus failing the subsequent adjustment. 3. If you run the installer with --help as argument, it pops up an X window displaying the help. In general, IIRC, we need to run a headless X just to run the installer in CLI/batch mode.
From a Linux distro maintainer perspective, the packaging is horrible. In particular separation of base installation, configuration, and add-ons is non-existent. Large amount of vendored dependencies, only then to depend on the most minute little packages that Ubuntu supposedly ships.
Setting up a reliable, reproducible CI/CD environment based on Vivado is a large headache.
That all goes to say: if anything, AMD/Xilinx should be paying its customers to deal with this. Unless there is a major improvement in the software distribution practices for Linux, I could not justify to my employer paying money for this experience.
On the other hand, if they commercialize on Linux support, there is soooo much that they can improve by a lot, who knows. Hope dies last and all.
Doesn't help that just to start out you are looking at a 110+ GB size for their tools, which as far as anyone can tell, isn't really justified by anything.
That's because in the EDA space, they have horrible software practices. Take the worst you can imagine and then go worse from there. So eventually, when things "appear to work" they end up taking a snapshot of a messy directory and calling that the deliverable asset.
Why would customers trust a company that does rug pull penny pinching moves like this? Tells me a lot.
Just a random rant: I used to do FPGA work for a living, and I remember Xilinx's ISE (Vivado before they renamed it and the company got bought by AMD) was Windows-only, but the first thing that popped up when starting it was a Cygwin window :D
This is terrible news for university users trying to professionalize their FPGA development with CI/CD. Which is probably the point of the change.
Charging for Vivado has always struck me as ridiculous. It's a software dongle that enables Xilinx hardware, and the hardware is how they make money. Give Vivado away for free and support it on Linux and Mac, and you'll sell 10x as many chips.
Well Gowin here I come I guess
I took Efinix. They have cute FPGA with memory in one package. It saves me lots of time for routing the board.
They are all the same. Greedy little bitches.
Another one of those reflex-triggering moments:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tQIdxbWhHSM
Hoping for a decent Chinese alternative to AMD and Intel...
Speculation:
1) This could actually be an attempt to gain more revenue from big customers that have users who use the free version to test that code can synthesize and run unit tests (by pretending to use smaller parts), and then only use the paid version for the final integration into the actual larger parts.
2) This could give them more customer data more easily. They make no secret of the fact that the free tiers share data with the mothership for product improvement reasons. Maybe they only want to maintain the infrastructure to do this on Windows, or maybe it's harder for customers to subvert on Windows.
3) There will be people running the Windows version on Linux, and explaining how to do it, in 3... 2... 1...
Are the prices so insane this is actually a viable option instead of just buying a bigger license? I always tell juniors to just submit a request for a licence since it will likely cost far less than retraining them or making them work harder and more to compensate for splitting things up (not FPGA related though).
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.
This Anatoli forum moderator looks like to be quite a very bad user representative.
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.
This is the absolute dumbest decision imaginable. The only people hurt by the removal of free trial software for Linux are students and amateurs.
Even Apple, possibly the greediest company in the world, knows the importance of cheap hardware and free software for students. Because those students and amateurs eventually become pros who make money decisions.
AMD is always so close to pulling ahead of Intel and Nvidia but somehow manage to shoot themselves in the foot constantly...
I think they've pulled ahead of Intel by a large margin
In market cap maybe but in total units sold? In importance?
~70% of PCs/servers sold have Intel chips in them.
What’s next? Take away mouse support in the free tier? You could these fucking cretins with GPT2 and the company would flourish.
I can see American companies quickly loose market dominance to Chinese FPGA manufacturers with this short sighted behavior. People don’t realize how big FPGAs are in Asia.
How is it sustainable for AMD to maintain their software on Linux for free? Would you maintain your own Linux software (and its distros) for $0?
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.)
So much wrong with your comment.
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.
> I see no problem with monetizing Linux users. If I am monetizing Windows and macOS users, there should be no exceptions towards 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.
First of all, you already pay for the FPGAs, and the only reason why you pay for them is that they are "Field-Programmable" GAs. To be able to use the product that you own, as advertised, you MUST have the AMD software tools, because they refuse to provide the technical documentation that would allow the use of FPGAs without vendor-provided tools.
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.
They are selling hardware.
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.
How is is sustainable for Apple to maintain MacOS for free? I see not problem with monetizing Mac users by making them pay extra for OS and especially its upgrades.
Maintaining support for Windows is free?
"free" as in what? Time?
There is always someone paying. Linux should be no different.
The users are paying plenty of money for AMD FPGAs.
Why should Windows be different?
> why I can use BASIC tier for simple, entry-level nodes on Windows, but not on Linux.
That’s exactly what people are asking for. Why do Linux users have to pay and Windows users don’t.
Some replies complain about the moderator not answering the main question. While this is a valid complaint, it is also likely that they don't know the answer as well. Now, the best reply would be to openly say that they don't have visibility into upper management's decisions. But, at the same time, I think it's possible that the way they're replying has to do with some internal guidelines on how to handle this sort of questions.
My personal thoughts on this is that EDA tooling is quite expensive to license, and I'm sure many people have jailbroken their Linux versions to avoid paying for the higher tiers, as Linux doesn't have as strong anti-tamper/app sandboxing capabilities as the other 2 big OSes.
Not saying I agree or support this decision, but I can see why they chose to do this, and their set of paying customers is quite different from your average piece of software.
If this were Google, they'd have made the whole backend of it cloud only, and required all customers to upload all data to their servers. Obviously this doesn't fly in a lot of industries FPGAs tend to be used in.