AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes

134

tteleforce about 2 hours ago 59 commentsRead Article on itsfoss.com

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Discussion (59 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

wewewedxfgdf•about 2 hours ago

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.

SSLy•about 1 hour ago

especially their marketing dept which made this decision seems to be run by absolute buffoons

spider-mario•about 1 hour ago

Should be the first of the two chances for the phrase to work.

fer•about 1 hour ago

I'm even surprised they have so much of the console market

Novosell•about 1 hour ago

I imagine it's due to having had decent enough GPUs and decent enough CPUs, from a single vendor.

If you want the platform to be x86 but not AMD then your only other choice is Intel, but they've only recently started making high performance GPUs. So then you need another vendor for the GPU, and your only choice is Nvidia.

A lot simpler, cheaper and predictable to go with a single vendor for both I imagine?

wongarsu•30 minutes ago

AMD also had the strongest offering for GPU and CPU using the same memory with the same address space. That allows you to switch between CPU and GPU processing for the same data, without paying the cost of moving the data to and from the GPU. Similar to what we now have on Apple silicon

They tried to push the same into the desktop market with their APUs, where it was mostly ignored. But console games only target a couple hardware configurations, making it viable to take advantage of such hardware features

philistine•20 minutes ago

You’re approaching this as if every company had the same corporate intentions.

Nvidia never cared much for those types of deals. They preferred to lose Apple as a business than to admit fault, they’ve always refused to compete on price for the business of Sony and Microsoft’s consoles. They’re adamant to beat at the sound of their own drum.

SecretDreams•41 minutes ago

AMD has long been the proof that hardware is easier than software. Apparently, hardware is also easier than marketing.

altairprime•27 minutes ago

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.

blackguardx•8 minutes ago

The "free" version of Vivado is used to develop for Xilinx/AMD's lower tier FPGAs. While offering what I assume are lower profit margins, these lower tier FPGAs make up a large portion of Xilinx/AMD's chip volume.

Xilinx/AMD charging for any of their tools is also a recent thing. 20 years ago, you could download these tools freely without even having to register on their website.

fsh•12 minutes ago

Vivado is an IDE for programming AMD FPGAs. One cannot use it without buying AMD hardware.

altairprime•1 minute ago

[delayed]

oytis•5 minutes ago

Never understood why FPGA vendors do it. Do they desperately want to show software ARR to shareholders?

adapteva•27 minutes ago

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.;-)

cogman10•18 minutes ago

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.

officialchicken•about 2 hours ago

Advanced Marking Disaster original thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309

donohoe•about 2 hours ago

Discussion from 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309

dgacmu•about 1 hour ago

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.

Jean-Papoulos•27 minutes ago

Very few, entreprise users (aka volume) will pay the license, hobbyists will pirate it if need be. AMD doesn't want to do support for the hobbyists for free, that's all.

fsh•9 minutes ago

No, AMD wants to collect some rent from people running Vivado in CI/CD environments.

oaiey•18 minutes ago

Understandable. But would it be much easier to release it without promise to support. That everyone would just accept.

ginko•about 1 hour ago

>I wonder how many Linux GPU sales their decision to penalize Linux on their FPGA line will cost them.

Not many I would guess.

boomskats•34 minutes ago

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

pjmlp•32 minutes ago

Always think about stuff like this, when asserting how much better AMD happens to be versus NVidia.

ginko•about 1 hour ago

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.

rob_c•22 minutes ago

But you just showed you have deep pockets and they think they can get you to open it again every year for the rest of time.

Xilinx was never positioned that it made sense for them to open it up. If/when it gets run into the ground by AMD short sightedness they might just open it to claim that was the plan all along...

azalemeth•about 2 hours ago

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.

wewewedxfgdf•about 2 hours ago

Nvidia supports their cards for many years - even quite old cards often have modern drivers.

AMD just does not see the world this way.

kokada•about 1 hour ago

NVIDIA ended support for their 10xx series [1]. To be clear, AMD also moved support for their equivalent 5xxx series to legacy drivers [2], but "supports their cards for many years" doesn't hold value if both companies stopped their respective GPUs at basically the same time.

Also remember that one of those 2 companies has opensource drivers for Linux for their old GPUs, while the other doesn't (newer NVIDIA GPUs have an opensource driver but this isn't the case for the 10xx series). Users of legacy NVIDIA cards needs on Linux needs to use their old driver branches, with results that are less than optimal to say the least.

[1]: https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-officially-ends-geforce-g...

[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/amd-says-that-its-no...

bigfatkitten•about 2 hours ago

This is about their FPGA tooling. It has nothing whatsoever to do with GPUs.

wewewedxfgdf•about 2 hours ago

So? I'm making a true observation about the companies. I am well aware this is about FPGA and that has nothing to do with my comment.

zx8080•about 1 hour ago

> 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?

IshKebab•3 minutes ago

Read the article. The old version will not be supported soon. I assume that means you also won't be able to register it.

15155•about 1 hour ago

QoR for advanced and large designs can change wildly between versions (for better or worse.)

fer•about 1 hour ago

Yes, working with recent distros. At some point I spun up a vm because there was no way to make it work after an upgrade.

tux3•about 1 hour ago

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"'

cozzyd•41 minutes ago

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.

rvz•about 1 hour ago

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.

bravetraveler•about 2 hours ago

Incredible, behaving as if they want another CUDA situation.

bigfishrunning•8 minutes ago

They want their *own* CUDA situation. if you're doing FPGA stuff, the Xilinx hardware is good and Vivaldi is really the only way to use it. AFAIK the open-source fpga situation is pretty far behind it (please correct me if I'm wrong, I work in a place that uses Xilinx FPGAs)

Meneth•about 1 hour ago

That's what you get for using unfree software.

lefra•37 minutes ago

There's no free alternatives, because AMD doesn't document the bitstream format (i.e. what you need to push to the FPGA to program it to do wha you want).

rob_c•18 minutes ago

I'm fairly sure the FPGA space is big enough there are alternate products for most of the offerings

tliltocatl•5 minutes ago

Xilinx has the best silicon. Everyone else is behind. Altera is basically dead thanks Intel. Lattice is nice for low power but performance-wise they are behind. Don't know much about Microchip, but from the little I've heard their tooling is a disaster even by the standards of FPGA tooling. Then there are Gowin (not bad, but Chinglish docs and everything), Gatemate (pretty innovative and vendor-backed nextpnr support - but only one low-mid FPGA with a promise to release chiplet assemblies of it latter). And Effinix - don't know much about them, do anyone have experience?

linuxftw•about 1 hour ago

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.

techcode•41 minutes ago

I don't see how that particular line of thinking applies when: 1) They continue to have a free version for Windows 2) They continue to have a version for Linux

I just can't see that cost of having a free Linux version (on top having a paid Linux version) is big?

rob_c•19 minutes ago

Think academic and small companies who don't pay for support opening corner case issues all the time publicly. They want none of the complex support unless you pay (reasonable imo).

And for those who forget RHEL for instance has to pay salaries to back port fixes and such and the same logic applies here.

blackguardx•4 minutes ago

Xilinx is/was an FPGA company until AMD bought them. Their primary revenue stream is selling chips. This is the equivalent of going back to the days of paid C/C++ compilers (anybody else remember that?).

lvl155•29 minutes ago

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.

Hnrobert42•37 minutes ago

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?

cogman10•16 minutes ago

AMD isn't giving away free stuff. They are selling FPGA hardware. But further, the free stuff has a lot of restrictions around it which practically gear it only for university usage. And the reason they do that is they want to have new graduates have experience with their software so they can demand it from their future employers.

MSFT_Edging•27 minutes ago

Basic Vivado is the bare minimum to develop for their hardware. A large amount of functionality is still locked away behind paid IP.

Most of the revenue comes from the IP cores.

A common business model for companies like this is to enable developers to learn their tools cheaply, so that when they develop something for their employer, they're more likely to reach for those tools/ecosystems and have the employer pay for those tools.

This just cuts out beginner/hobbyist FPGA devs from using industry standard tooling.

oytis•6 minutes ago

You need to buy their hardware to use it. In fact there is no way to use most of their hardware without Vivado. So it's more like they are blocking you from using things you've already paid for

eecc•31 minutes ago

It’s still free on Windows. Your argument doesn’t have legs to walk on.

perlgeek•26 minutes ago

Even more than that, they still have to maintain the software to work on Linux, because they have a paid on Linux.

So if they have to keep maintaining it and offer the basic tier for free on Linux... just why? It doesn't make any sense to me.

Maybe they receive "too many" bug reports from Linux users?

adamas•18 minutes ago

And not because Linux is more buggy but because Linux is populated with people that tend to know how to make bug reports ?

tliltocatl•15 minutes ago

The software is useless without their chips and the chips cost a fortune. It's not "business model no longer supports giving away free stuff". It's just bean-counters cutting corners.