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It's long been said:
"AMD never misses a chance to miss a chance."
In this case, the chance to trash its reputation with customers.
especially their marketing dept which made this decision seems to be run by absolute buffoons
AMD has long been the proof that hardware is easier than software. Apparently, hardware is also easier than marketing.
They're quite brilliant with their NICs though.
I'm even surprised they have so much of the console market
Should be the first of the two chances for the phrase to work.
Non-paying users aren’t customers, though, so they must view all this outrage seems irrelevant. Which suggests that they view free-tier Linux users as significantly less likely to ever pay for its use. That matches my understanding of the (non-Steam) Linux as a miserly and demanding target market, so I don’t really fault them for the choice — especially given how brutally expensive it is to support the IDIC of Miscellaneous Linuxes. Kind of surprised they haven’t just withdrawn free support for anything but Steam Linux, in order to lower their costs (and to produce a ‘free’ build that anyone can run privately but doesn’t interop at all with enterprise). Maybe they want it to be a ‘shareware trial’ for enterprise? Or perhaps they just haven’t thought of it yet.
> “Until now, it has been available for free on both Windows and Linux”
If it’s any consolation, it wasn’t and still isn’t available on macOS. Also the part about Linux having a “small user base” made me chuckle.
That’s the opposite of what I’m observing. If they wanted to save costs, they would have dropped Linux support altogether. But instead, they are making it a paid benefit. It can only mean that their Linux user base is growing, ie. more commercial operators are turning to Linux. Still, there are much better ways to handle this without alienating your user base.
> It can only mean that their Linux user base is growing, ie. more commercial operators are turning to Linux.
Well, more correctly that they think the commercial base has grown, and that there's revenue on the table by forcing their standard-edition-using commercial Linux users into contracts.
Maybe the thinking is that the Linux users are more sophisticated and able to self-support than windows shops, and so they're choosing not to buy support even though they could? Seems not implausible, though hard to measure even from within AMD.
Basically this seems like a "good beancounting but terrible marketing" decision out of product management. They're not being deliberately mean to their amateur users, they're just trying to squeeze out a few more dollars for their department's quarterly.
There’s a lot of misinformation in this thread from people who didn’t know about Vivado until this controversy.
> But instead, they are making it a paid benefit. It can only mean that their Linux user base is growing, ie. more commercial operators are turning to Linux.
Vivado has always been primarily a paid product, including on Linux. The free tier has been a limited version useful for small projects or as a trial, which can support a limited set of FPGAs. The paid tier licenses have price tags in the thousands.
They aren’t making new paid products for a growing user base. They are continuing to support their paid Linux user base.
Exactly why we zero asic is making Platypus devices open bitstream and all tooling foss from day one...to protect the world against future evil/dumb version of ourselves.
https://www.zeroasic.com/platypus https://www.zeroasic.com/projects/wildebeest https://www.zeroasic.com/projects/logik
Of course we don't have silicon yet...so nobody here cares. I think a lot of people forget that Xilinx spent $10B+ develop their awesome devices. I figure we can do it with 1/10th of that.;-)
IDK where it's at now, but 15 years ago xilinx was some of the most garbage software I'd ever worked with. Super buggy, constantly corrupting itself, and this was for me just doing university level projects.
God speed if you can get something a lot better for a lot cheaper.
AMD business should be selling FPGA hardware. The software suite should come for free. If it doesn't then people should not purchase AMD FPGAs.
It is absurd that in 2026 you have to pay for such tools. It feels like buying a propietary compiler in 80's or 90's.
No one wants that anymore.
They are also selling IP's so I wonder why they would come and sell us their freaking compiler. Why wouldn't user just opt to using cracked versions instead?
Advanced Marking Disaster original thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309
Whelp, I’m an embedded engineering consultant and will no longer recommend these products to my customers. Or rather, I will ask them to avoid these products entirely.
AMD, you can make more money selling chips than software, but take away the entry level software and you eliminate the on-ramp. I’m not buying a license to prototype.
Discussion from 4 days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309
Large company again makes local decision without considering the effects outside that single product line.
I wonder how many Linux GPU sales their decision to penalize Linux on their FPGA line will cost them.
When AMD bought Xilinx I was hoping they'd open up the software side like they (eventually) did with their GPU drivers. Looks like that isn't happening anytime soon.
It seems silly to put up SW barriers for people to use your fairly expensive HW, but what do I know.
Is anyone else annoyed by the click-/rage-bait style of writing?
Second: Can this software be run from Wine on Linux?
> Its comparatively smaller user base means less commercial pressure, making it an easy target to throw under the bus whenever companies feel like cutting costs or boosting profits.
Eventually the empire will strike back though.
I now marked AMD as a company that can not be trusted.
We need more indie companies in general, and cheap 3d printing for the masses. It'll be a long way to go to nanoscale perfection, but we'll have to go it - AMD but also Intel before, showed that NONE of those mega-greedy corporations can be trusted. They'll always try to do a switcheroo move. But as I stated here: the empire will strike back eventually. The Barbara Streisand effect is real.
Never understood why FPGA vendors do it. Do they desperately want to show software ARR to shareholders?
While Vivado/Vitis etc do amazing things, I challenge anyone to find a person who enjoys using them without TCL interfaces.
These tools do need attention, it's too bad there's not a better model than subscription bases like these.
Pretty sure, based on TCL base, that these tools were native Unix at some point, so the no-linux-free-beer vs windows-free-beer version are hilarious...
Ultimately one has, with so many vendor tools, a windows box somewhere so make it a remote compile machine.
Smacks of collusion honestly. Maybe Microsoft offered them some kind of deal
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309
Also this site (itsfoss.com) is unusable and riddled with hundreds of ads and sets my machines fans to full blast.
At least use another credible source or go to the source instead as per the HN guidelines.
This title and premise are incorrect. It's not a bait-and-switch unless the bait was unavailable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch Vivado really was available free. There's a lot of potential criticisms one could write of the decision to change that (and basically all of them were made in this and the previous thread), but bait-and-switch is not one of them.
I'm guessing it works fine under Wine.
I think AMD simply looked at the numbers and they get a lot of support requests for the free version, more than the Windows version
(of course that's the bean counter calculation without factoring in "karma")
And I kinda agree, the cost of supporting those tools on different platforms is not great
Honestly just run Wine
Always think about stuff like this, when asserting how much better AMD happens to be versus NVidia.
This has been resolved and is no longer an issue.
I have specifically chosen AMD _many_ times in the past precisely because of their better linux support and more open toolchain.
This is an absolute foot-gun moment. And the gaslighting PR responses are just unacceptable. I'm very disappointed in them.
> Starting with the 2026.1 release
Don't upgrade. It's just that simple.
Do they offer some unique features in the new version or is it a habit to upgrade everything every day?
This software seems to never have been open source/freely licensed. That's not a bait and switch. They were giving you a commercial product, for free, and now have decided not to.
It's likely a case where maintaining separate builds for the free and commercial tiers was getting complex. Often times, this kind of software requires lots of manual reviewing and adding or removing modules, and they probably decided it's just not worth it.
if "the ai" was delivering value you'd think it would be lowering both cost to develop these dev tools as well as the cost to support them. In that light the move is odd unless they don't know how to use AI to lower those costs or it cant.
Pretty sure this 'article' was written by an LLM, having scraped the HN discussion on here from 4 days ago. Nothing new there apart from a clickbait title and a ton of ads.
Link to my comment, so that I don't repeat myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256417
What are some good alternatives (to Xilinx/AMD) for hobbyists / small outfits?
Folks feel outrage when companies start charging for things that were once free.
Okay, but what if you run a company whose business model no longer supports giving away free stuff? How can you transition? What would users consider less outrageous?
I mean perhaps the silver lining is the projects I use are all stuck on 2022.1 for now. I wonder if this is because they want to gate usage by AI agents.
The rumor on the FPGA reddit is that they're going to walk it back.
Quote: 'The only source I can give at this time is "trust me bro"'
Kinda shitty but just a minor speed bump. Just run Windows on a VM in Linux, right?
It'll be shit for paying Linux customers too as a large user base of "free"-version Linux users could spot and report bugs easily.
Incredible, behaving as if they want another CUDA situation.
Imagine if AMD focused on making their tools better instead of resorting to sleazy tactics.
Imagine if the whole industry made interoperable tools that worked on open data formats and competed on merit instead of customer lock-in.
Imagine the world we could have.
That's what you get for using unfree software.
AMD is not a good company. They stopped innovating after Intel was put down. Except, now Intel has govt backing while AMD will face significantly more competition from not only x86 but arm. Stock price says otherwise but I think they had more than enough time to catch up to Nvidia and simply refused to compete.