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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?

#171

Post by pyrale »

izacus wrote: post #92
pyrale wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like the notion of seeing different treatment between OSes. No one likes being punished for a choice that shouldn't be any of the selling party's business. That's especially true in the Linux community, which was the target of Microsoft's anticompetitive policies for decades. That's just like when macOS users got mad when they learned they were targeted by marketing schemes to sell them more expensive stuff [1].…

Maintaining software on Linux just takes more time and effort - due to less stability and number of distros.

AMD does maintain Linux anyway, for their paid tiers. It's not like they're saving money by dumping the free tier for Linux.

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

#172

Post by bigbadfeline »

wormius wrote: post #169
dangus wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

You know, it used to be "The customer is always right".

But it's become "Whaat? Are you talking to us you uncivilized, stinky hippy peons? How dare you? We serve only the rich corps now, we don't care about you or your money."

> But customer facing is such an awful position for the wages they usually make.

So you're saying that rich AMD doesn't pay their employees enough and for this reason, their unsatisfied customers should be careful not to say bad things about the company to the employees mistreated by that same company... There are too many logical errors here to describe in a short comment.

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

#173

Post by robinsonb5 »

rustybolt wrote: post #167
robinsonb5 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good choice!

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.)

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

#174

Post by ua709 »

lpribis wrote: post #170
ua709 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Are you seriously suggesting hobbyists should tapeout an ASIC instead of use an FPGA?

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

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

#175

Post by tardedmeme »

atq2119 wrote: post #144
tux3 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vivado already supports Linux, the development is supported by very large customers that put FPGAs in cars, [REDACTED], and other kinds of objects that crash into other objects. This is just hurting students and hobbyists.

And, since there's a pipeline from students and hobbyists to professional use, it's risking the future.

AMD has been unable to not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for ages. I'd almost say someone high up is getting kickbacks from their competitors.

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

#178

Post by esquivalience »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #122
Aurornis wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, this struck me as rather odd and unprofessional too. Do you really want to depend on a company where customer facing representatives can’t handle people being upset? 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 enf…

> 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.

They were very sweary.

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

#180

Post by dangus »

wormius wrote: post #169
dangus wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

If you want my opinion I think what these mods said had nothing to do with the stress of the environment, they’re just following something of a community moderator trope where they maybe aren’t even employees and at all but enjoy the authority of moderation.

They have no authority or knowledge of the topic at hand at all but can’t resist weighing in and throwing authority around.

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