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?
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
Also also, AMD’s play has always been to produce HW that offers good performance/$, with the downside of having much weaker SW offerings to go with it.
Consoles are always pressured to minimize upfront purchase costs, and they generally replace the vendor-provider SW stack with their own anyways.
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.
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 Kind of surprised they haven’t just withdrawn free support for anything but Steam Linux, in order to lower their costs (and to produce a ‘free’ build that anyone can run privately but doesn’t interop at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.
Hardware isn’t where the margins are, and probably is somewhat of a loss leader for small-batch users; for hobby users I would hazard a guess that they’re running at around -10% profit on small sales to try and drive subscription revenue multipliers, and for already-paying users this change is essentially irrelevant and will have zero downside impact on sub revenue. Terrible way to run a profitable business if you fuck up the hardware undercut, but if you can get away with it, subscriptions are certainly a valid answer to maintenance of the platform over time. I still think they didn’t go far enough to make a meaningful dent in conversions from free to paying, though.
(Note that mention of Steam Linux is not about the games aspect, but about the Valve’s seeming plans to become a competitive target for Linux support to the exclusion of other consumer-focused miscellaneity. But I tend to go on about this too often so I’ll leave that hobby-horse in the stall.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Your "true observation" doesn't contribute to the context of this particular topic thread which "has nothing to do with [your] comment", as you are "well aware". You should review the HN Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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.
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)
I seriously think the CUDA situation was set up intentionally.
Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) is related to Lisa Su (AMD CEO).
A decade ago, I saw a demo of some AMD skunkworks GPU datacenter tech, that could execute CUDA natively on AMD/ATI graphics cards. Initially was half speed, but having the flexibility was crazy amazing. Created a big buzz in the big iron and educational markets.
Where'd it go? Buried. You cant even find articles about it. Its a few comments on edtech datacenters.
Now look at AMD's graphics line. Where's their ROCm LLM tooling? It's a fucking joke. Its like they're intentionally sinking it for her Nvidia uncle Huang. And Su takes the cheaper CPU market and offers better features than Intel.
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).
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I'm even surprised they have so much of the console market
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?
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
Also also, AMD’s play has always been to produce HW that offers good performance/$, with the downside of having much weaker SW offerings to go with it.
Consoles are always pressured to minimize upfront purchase costs, and they generally replace the vendor-provider SW stack with their own anyways.
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.
Should be the first of the two chances for the phrase to work.
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.
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.
Vivado is an IDE for programming AMD FPGAs. One cannot use it without buying AMD hardware.
Hardware isn’t where the margins are, and probably is somewhat of a loss leader for small-batch users; for hobby users I would hazard a guess that they’re running at around -10% profit on small sales to try and drive subscription revenue multipliers, and for already-paying users this change is essentially irrelevant and will have zero downside impact on sub revenue. Terrible way to run a profitable business if you fuck up the hardware undercut, but if you can get away with it, subscriptions are certainly a valid answer to maintenance of the platform over time. I still think they didn’t go far enough to make a meaningful dent in conversions from free to paying, though.
(Note that mention of Steam Linux is not about the games aspect, but about the Valve’s seeming plans to become a competitive target for Linux support to the exclusion of other consumer-focused miscellaneity. But I tend to go on about this too often so I’ll leave that hobby-horse in the stall.)
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.
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.
Advanced Marking Disaster original thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309
Found the UserBenchmark alt!
Discussion from 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309
I'm guessing it works fine under Wine.
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.
>I wonder how many Linux GPU sales their decision to penalize Linux on their FPGA line will cost them.
Not many I would guess.
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.
Understandable. But would it be much easier to release it without promise to support. That everyone would just accept.
No, AMD wants to collect some rent from people running Vivado in CI/CD environments.
Never understood why FPGA vendors do it. Do they desperately want to show software ARR to shareholders?
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
Always think about stuff like this, when asserting how much better AMD happens to be versus NVidia.
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.
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...
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.
Nvidia supports their cards for many years - even quite old cards often have modern drivers.
AMD just does not see the world this way.
This is about their FPGA tooling. It has nothing whatsoever to do with GPUs.
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.
It is completely different. FPGA tooling is not the same as a driver for a consumer product.
A lot of the serious CUDA compute stuff is also not supported on all platforms (it's linux only, because why would you do such stuff on windows).
Your "true observation" doesn't contribute to the context of this particular topic thread which "has nothing to do with [your] comment", as you are "well aware". You should review the HN Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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...
> 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?
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.
QoR for advanced and large designs can change wildly between versions (for better or worse.)
Read the article. The old version will not be supported soon. I assume that means you also won't be able to register it.
People are still using Vivado 2019 (and earlier) and ISE. The ability to use these versions isn't going anywhere.
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"'
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.
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.
Incredible, behaving as if they want another CUDA situation.
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)
I seriously think the CUDA situation was set up intentionally.
Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) is related to Lisa Su (AMD CEO).
A decade ago, I saw a demo of some AMD skunkworks GPU datacenter tech, that could execute CUDA natively on AMD/ATI graphics cards. Initially was half speed, but having the flexibility was crazy amazing. Created a big buzz in the big iron and educational markets.
Where'd it go? Buried. You cant even find articles about it. Its a few comments on edtech datacenters.
Now look at AMD's graphics line. Where's their ROCm LLM tooling? It's a fucking joke. Its like they're intentionally sinking it for her Nvidia uncle Huang. And Su takes the cheaper CPU market and offers better features than Intel.
That's what you get for using unfree software.
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).
I'm fairly sure the FPGA space is big enough there are alternate products for most of the offerings
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?
This isn't why there are no free alternatives: there are for 7 Series chips. Free alternatives have terrible QoR.
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.
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?
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.
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?).
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.
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?
It’s still free on Windows. Your argument doesn’t have legs to walk on.
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?
And not because Linux is more buggy but because Linux is populated with people that tend to know how to make bug reports ?
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.
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.
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.
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