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Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

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Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#161

Post by dismalaf »

fhn wrote: post #153
dismalaf wrote: post #136

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 b…

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.

Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#162

Post by tremon »

kriro wrote: post #149
guiambros wrote: post #5

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 embrac…

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.

Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#164

Post by ua709 »

akarambir wrote: post #2

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

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 ( 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.

Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#165

Post by dangus »

Aurornis wrote: post #132
Dylan16807 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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.

Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#166

Post by ua709 »

jwrallie wrote: post #11

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.

Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#167

Post by rustybolt »

robinsonb5 wrote: post #143
rustybolt wrote: post #82

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 d…

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 10CL02…

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.

Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#168

Post by bborud »

hluska wrote: post #156
bborud wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (a…

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.

Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#169

Post by wormius »

dangus wrote: post #165
Aurornis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?

#170

Post by lpribis »

ua709 wrote: post #164
akarambir wrote: post #2

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

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 micro…

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.

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