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Analyzed from 7694 words in the discussion.
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#linux#amd#free#support#fpga#windows#software#more#fpgas#xilinx
Discussion Sentiment
Analyzed from 7694 words in the discussion.
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Discussion (226 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
To grow the ecosystem, AMD needs more people working on their hardware. Restricting Linux will only alienates students, hobbyists, and devs who want to adopt AMD tech.
- From long term AMD user
Answering the actual question seems not a high priority
The older I get the less I want to deal with companies that act like primadonnas and the technologies they make. This is also why I don’t do phone apps: your market access is 100% controlled by two companies that can wipe out your business overnight.
Imagine having to work with these people professionally. With real money involved. While probably not as high risk as mobile development, their customer representatives seem like real primadonnas. You’ll be happier without these people in your life.
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.
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.
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.
Obviously, I believe that a decision like that made by AMD now is a much more "unacceptable abusive behavior" than any kind of verbal insult ever known to mankind.
This kind of decision is a masked price rise of the AMD FPGAs that applies only to small businesses and individuals, while the big quasi-monopolistic companies are not affected, which will make competing with them even more difficult.
What annoys me most about this kind of policies aimed to hurt small businesses and individuals and favor big companies, which have become more and more frequent, is that in most cases they do not provide any financial benefit whatsoever to the company that enacts them, because they limit competition not in the market where that company activates, but in related markets.
However such policies are very beneficial for the entire class of people who are major shareholders, board members or executives in big companies, by ensuring that all markets are eventually dominated by few, which has happened especially after the end of the nineties of the past century, resulting in the current unhealthy economies of the Western countries and especially of USA.
This success of the quasi-monopolies has been caused by the lack of truly adequate consumer protection laws.
AMD is clearly just putting on a performance here though, using the backlash they get as a weapon.
Which is true in a vacuum. Insulting _people_ is abusive behavior and shouldn't be accepted.
The issue here is the posts aren't insulting people, they're insulting a company, and a company can't be mentally abused.
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?!
That said, the tone and basic grammar of AMD's support rep isn't what I would've expected either.
They did answer the question, though:
> AMD expectation is that the BASIC tier licensing level is used for simple, entry‑level needs. While more advanced, production-based workflows are aligned with paid tiers.
In other words, they're saying hobbyists and beginners are on Windows anyway, and students can get a free version if they apply through the right channels. No more freebies.
AMD wants people to pay for their software. Instead of going "why are you bullying Linux users", AMD customers should probably be going "thank god the Windows version is still free (for now)"
I suspect they're massively underestimating how many hobbyists and students are on Linux. We're not talking about a typical demographic here, we're talking about people interested in computers and technology at precisely the level that Windows and MacOS aim to isolate from the user.
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.
AMD’s MBA types extinguish that early mindshare at their own peril.
It does make me wonder how much money they must be losing on these chips that they've turned this desperate for licensing costs.
- A regular tactic used by our former autocratic ruler, or most corrupted people
> This is AMD's marketing decision.
> Kind Regards,
> Anatoli Curran,
> Xilinx/AMD Forum Moderator
I mean, nobody in that forum necessarily knows why. It just came from above.
"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.
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.
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
I recently bought a hobby FPGA kit because I think the Von Neumann model is a beautiful innovation and I want to learn more about doing useful computation tasks from the lowest level logical components. I've always been interested in computers, but when I was in grade school the only useful computers I could afford were discarded PCs that I brought back to life with Linux distros. I now have a fulfilling career as a direct result of access to cheap hardware and open-source software when I had much more time and much less money than I do now. Decisions like AMD's are a long-term negative for the industry.
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.
It’s too bad that a vendor with only slightly worse hardware hasn’t eaten Xilinx’s lunch by having a genuinely pleasant development process. These companies aren’t selling synthesis tools — they’re selling hardware. Make the developers want to use it! (Intel, for all their faults, understands this.)
[0] It takes a special sort of incompetence to take 5 figures worth of fancy chips, stick them in a poorly packaged box, write only part of the address in it, and hope that FedEx will deliver it somewhere useful.
At this point its a net negative. Nothing like a massive bloated Vivado that now requires a slow spywareOS to run its rotting carcass of gigabytes (100's) of java.
About the only good thing Vivado does is fail to synthesize correctly... oh wait that's a mystery bug that I and many others have run into. And impossible to understand why.
FPGA tooling desperately needs open source tooling like C needed GCC.
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.
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.
Does support all FPGAs from the Series7 (Spartan7, Artix7, Kintex7, Zynq70xx)
Sometime after the heat death of the universe, maybe. IME raising prices during development is their modus operandi.
That being said, I have used their ice40 and ECP5 FPGAs with Yosys for a couple of small projects and that worked perfectly fine.
Windows cannot provide feature parity for workloads that require cross compiling, AMD could at least support RHEL like the old days.
Lattice, Xilinx, Gowin, Renesas, Colognechip,
Generate a bitstream with our online tool. https://caas.symbioticeda.com/
https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/university-program.html
You can get free licenses and donated hardware through this program.
Edit: if it is not clear, the way you treat the community is one way I evaluate my decisions to support or not your company when I suggest using your products to others, students or not.
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.
They do still support Linux... but only if you give them money.
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.
In the long run they will be replaced by more competitive companies like Efinix.
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.
They aren't saving themselves any time or effort because linux is still supported for paying users.
Case in point, the HN post you're commenting on is a link to their support forum. Search for _anything_ there, and this the pinned article that appears on top of every results page (from feb 2024):
> Is your Operating System supported by ISE/Vivado tools? Assistance and support won’t be provided for software and IP installed on unsupported OS!
> Note: Technical Support and assistance will be provided ONLY for Software and IP installed on supported Operating System!
> It is strongly suggested to check if the OS you are working with, is one of the supported operating system for ISE/Vivado tools!
*There have been many questions where users are trying to install or run into issues with using an unsupported OS for ISE/Vivado tools.*
> Assistance and support won’t be provided for issues observed on unsupported operating system!
> For the list of supported OSs for ISE 14.7, please check page #7 of UG631: https://docs.xilinx.com/v/u/en-US/irn
Platform support != customer support. Search that forum and you'll see. I imagine their paying customers are rejoicing at this decision.
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?)
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 ÂŁ100.
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.
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.)
https://github.com/openxc7
The cost of the tooling is probably blocking a few sales, but the biggest blocker for FPGA sales is price of the parts themselves. FPGAs make the most sense where absolute quantities are low and the customer is not cost-sensitive.
As soon as you get volume, ASIC wins out. And cost sensitive applications can almost always make do with a CPU that has the correct IO configuration. For FPGAs to win at scale they'd need to be significantly cheaper.
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.
There are also free Linux versions of Lattice Diamond, Gowin EDA and Efinix's Efinity software.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I want a robust open-source ecosystem where anyone can take my hardware projects and modify them without needing to deal with licensing friction.
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.
Of course, if it were faster, that would be a huge win for the open source implementation.
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.
Another casualty of this will be running the tools in docker containers, some folks have made some good templates for them and they greatly simplify deployment/installation.
(I used to prefer the AMD/Xilinx dev setup, but that has been a bit, and using FuseSoC makes moving platforms a lot easier).
There is no realistic way to build an OSS or FOSS toolchain without reverse engineering Vivado and dumping the trade secrets contained in it 1:1
Even if you build a clean room version of Vivado, you still need the FPGA metadata and clean rooming the metadata for all FPGAs is basically impossible.
Once you understand this, then it sounds incredible dishonest to argue that the Linux community should put in the effort to support a hardware vendor that is hostile to offering their own Linux support when that same company's GPU division had no problem publishing an open source GPU driver for Linux.
Extracting trade secrets isn't a violation of anyone's IP rights. Trade secrets are protected against being leaked by employees but they are explicitly not protected against reverse engineering.
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.
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...
~70% of PCs/servers sold have Intel chips in them.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tQIdxbWhHSM
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.
I see no problem with monetizing Linux users. If I am monetizing Windows and macOS users, there should be no exceptions towards Linux especially as Linux support is always ill defined (there are hundreds of distros to support and test.)
1: The software is not free. There is what essentially amounts to a free trial. This free trial used to support Windows and Linux. Now the free version only supports Windows, only the paid tiers work on Linux.
2: The software is what amounts to a hardware-specific compiler/IDE. AMD sells the hardware, with healthy margins. Asking "how is it sustainable for AMD to maintain [Vivado] .. for free" is the same as asking, "how is it sustainable for AMD to maintain their OpenGL drivers for free". They have a solid revenue stream from hardware sales that's enabled by the software.
3: Maintaining a free Linux version is close to 0 additional cost. They already need to maintain a free tier because they provide that to Windows, they already need to maintain Linux support because they provide that for the paid tiers. The only extra maintenance would be whatever edge case bugs occur only on the free tier and only when compiled for Linux.
Here I agree with you - Linux users shouldn't expect any special privileges here. But we're not asking for special treatment, we're asking that we continue to be given the same options as Windows users, just as we were for all previous versions of the software.
What people are objecting to is that for the latest version (and future versions) of the software an existing free tier has been withdrawn from Linux users - and only from Linux users.
It is abusive to request an additional big payment in order to use the bought product as intended. This additional payment for the FPGA programming tool is negligible for big companies, which also get great discounts in the price of the FPGAs they buy, but it hurts any small companies and individuals who want to use FPGAs.
These kind of policies never increase in any way the revenue of a company like AMD but they ensure that any market where such policies are frequent become dominated by a few quasi-monopolies, instead of having a healthy competition that keeps prices low for computers, as it existed in electronics until around a quarter of century ago.
Their FPGA development software is not an independent product, but it is a part of the FPGAs they are selling, like the boxes in which such FPGAs are packaged.
Your claim that they get $0 for their software is as ridiculous as the claim that Intel can no longer sell boxed CPUs, because they get $0 for the cardboard and plastic packages of their CPUs.
For now, only the Linux version of the FPGA tools has been discontinued, the free and worse Windows version still exists, so what you say in the last version of your comment is still wrong, because the Windows users are not monetized, yet.
You'd think removing friction on the software side for someone who already bought their hardware would be in their interest. Especially for students and hobbyists, who will want use what they already know once they enter the industry.
There is always someone paying. Linux should be no different.
That’s exactly what people are asking for. Why do Linux users have to pay and Windows users don’t.