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

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

#141

Post by astrobe_ »

joe_mamba wrote: post #134
liendolucas wrote: post #111

AMD business should be selling FPGA hardware. The software suite should come for free. If it doesn't then people should not purchase AMD FPGAs. It is absurd that in 2026 you have to pay for such tools. It feels like buying a propietary compiler in 80's or 90's. No one wants that anymore.

>The software suite should come for free. Ideally yes, SW should be free, but we don't live in an ideal world. This isn't Apple or Google who can give you SW for free since they take a 30% cut on everything on the Appstore besides the profit margins on the HW they sell you. The typical customers of FPGAs are large HW companies with money to spend on SW, not tinkerers in their garage who might some day build a billion…

SW dev costs can be accounted for in the HW price tag, especially when you sell a lot of units, and assuming the SW is much better than "good enough". HW is the best licensing key; if you can do that, go for it.

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

#142

Post by tredre3 »

joe_mamba wrote: post #134
liendolucas wrote: post #111

AMD business should be selling FPGA hardware. The software suite should come for free. If it doesn't then people should not purchase AMD FPGAs. It is absurd that in 2026 you have to pay for such tools. It feels like buying a propietary compiler in 80's or 90's. No one wants that anymore.

>The software suite should come for free. Ideally yes, SW should be free, but we don't live in an ideal world. This isn't Apple or Google who can give you SW for free since they take a 30% cut on everything on the Appstore besides the profit margins on the HW they sell you. The typical customers of FPGAs are large HW companies with money to spend on SW, not tinkerers in their garage who might some day build a billion…

> So there's zero incentive to give away SW, that's costly to develop, for free.

The cost of the software required to develop or operate the hardware should be included in the cost of the hardware. I say this as someone who's been into embedded development for 20 years. It's simply a part of the cost to make the hardware.

Support should be an additional paid service, that every single of my former employer would have paid. But the toolchain itself, as-is with no warranty, should be free.

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

#143

Post by joe_mamba »

astrobe_ wrote: post #141
joe_mamba wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The software suite should come for free. Ideally yes, SW should be free, but we don't live in an ideal world. This isn't Apple or Google who can give you SW for free since they take a 30% cut on everything on the Appstore besides the profit margins on the HW they sell you. The typical customers of FPGAs are large HW companies with money to spend on SW, not tinkerers in their garage who might some day build a billion…

SW dev costs can be accounted for in the HW price tag, especially when you sell a lot of units, and assuming the SW is much better than "good enough". HW is the best licensing key; if you can do that, go for it.

>SW dev costs can be accounted for in the HW price tag

That would then make you chips more expensive than the competition and less competitive on the BOM side, and BOM costs are a different accounting budget than SW licenses.

People in the industry have already thought of this. HN likes to think they somehow found the magic solution nobody ever has thought before, when the truth is HN doesn't understand sales of the HW industry.

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

#144

Post by bigyabai »

joe_mamba wrote: post #139
bigyabai wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So there's zero incentive to give away SW, that's costly to develop, for free. I don't think that's necessarily a hard rule, here. Nvidia won over the HPC segment by offering CUDA and PTX as a free value-add to their hardware, and ended up becoming a multi-trillion dollar company that ate AMD's datacenter market for lunch. Giving away software to commoditize your compliment might be a good idea, for AMD.

>Nvidia won over the HPC segment by offering CUDA and PTX as a free value-add to their hardware Yeah but people would buy Nvidia chips mainly for gaming, not (just) for CUDA, so basically the massive gaming clientele would finance expensive projects that don't yet make any money like CUDA. Meanwhile nobnody buys FPGAs for playing at home en-masse. There's no equivalent consumer market like gamers for the FPGA vendors…

Nvidia played dirty, sure, but they did give away expensive, professional B2B grade software for free. It bolstered their position as the dominant GPGPU vendor in a B2B context, obsoleted half-assed libraries like OpenCL, and killed competing businesses in the cradle. Gamers subsidized it, but not by much (especially nowadays).

IMO, this is a question about where AMD wants to be in the stack. They can sell hardware, they can license their IP, but they're going to be bent over a table selling software licenses that people don't want. A free HDL software suite can help you sell hardware and license IP, whereas an expensive one can cut you out of the FPGA/ASIC market entirely.

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

#145

Post by joe_mamba »

tredre3 wrote: post #142
joe_mamba wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The software suite should come for free. Ideally yes, SW should be free, but we don't live in an ideal world. This isn't Apple or Google who can give you SW for free since they take a 30% cut on everything on the Appstore besides the profit margins on the HW they sell you. The typical customers of FPGAs are large HW companies with money to spend on SW, not tinkerers in their garage who might some day build a billion…

> So there's zero incentive to give away SW, that's costly to develop, for free. The cost of the software required to develop or operate the hardware should be included in the cost of the hardware. I say this as someone who's been into embedded development for 20 years. It's simply a part of the cost to make the hardware. Support should be an additional paid service, that every single of my former employer would have…

See my reply to the same point someone else made below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48312059

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

#146

Post by IshKebab »

rob_c wrote: post #46
lefra wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not. There's a duopoly between AMD (Xilinx) and Intel (Altera). There's more choice at the very low end but if you're going for a powerful FPGA (which is mostly what people need) those are the choices.

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

#147

Post by raron »

danhor wrote: post #115
tardedmeme wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Winmodems are a very sensible idea. You know software-defined radio? They are that, but for modems. Expandable to support any current or future protocol, at the cost of CPU time. Why do we like SDRs but hate SDMs? That's an irrational position. The actual problem with winmodems was them breaking the established software/hardware boundary, and the Linux community not having the resources to follow suit. Nothing stops…

> Nothing stops someone from taking the free Windows Vivado and making it run on Linux The EULA and the fact that the linux versior runs faster & has fewer bugs. > just the device-dependent backend would be a major improvement and the frontend and optimizer could be shared with other toolchains That's yosys and it's used by smaller commercial vendors. > or reverse engineering then bitstream format for these FPGAs Get…

This. If AMD / Xilinx would publish the documentation what you would need to use their chips, probably very few would use Vivado or ISE.

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

#148

Post by astrobe_ »

joe_mamba wrote: post #143
astrobe_ wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SW dev costs can be accounted for in the HW price tag, especially when you sell a lot of units, and assuming the SW is much better than "good enough". HW is the best licensing key; if you can do that, go for it.

>SW dev costs can be accounted for in the HW price tag That would then make you chips more expensive than the competition and less competitive on the BOM side, and BOM costs are a different accounting budget than SW licenses. People in the industry have already thought of this. HN likes to think they somehow found the magic solution nobody ever has thought before, when the truth is HN doesn't understand sales of the…

It depends on the HW:SW cost ratio and the volume. In favourable case the extra bit on the price tag can amount to a rounding error. Moreover, the price tag includes a profit margin, which is usually adjusted to match the competition already.

Besides, "ignorant" HN comments on e.g. FOSS software and funding problems have mentioned that the paperwork you have to do to buy software licences can be a PITA, so free software can be perceived as a plus when the R&D selects the parts.

People have already thought of that, sure. But has it been thought about and executed properly? Like the added value of open-sourcing the SW (made a lot easier when you don't need to copy-protect it). Or do they just go for the extra source of profit the SW licence sales provides, anyway?

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

#149

Post by joe_mamba »

astrobe_ wrote: post #148
joe_mamba wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>SW dev costs can be accounted for in the HW price tag That would then make you chips more expensive than the competition and less competitive on the BOM side, and BOM costs are a different accounting budget than SW licenses. People in the industry have already thought of this. HN likes to think they somehow found the magic solution nobody ever has thought before, when the truth is HN doesn't understand sales of the…

It depends on the HW:SW cost ratio and the volume. In favourable case the extra bit on the price tag can amount to a rounding error. Moreover, the price tag includes a profit margin, which is usually adjusted to match the competition already. Besides, "ignorant" HN comments on e.g. FOSS software and funding problems have mentioned that the paperwork you have to do to buy software licences can be a PITA, so free softw…

In my Embedded work experience, the BOM costs matters more than SW licensing costs. Which matches the business model of Xilinx.

The company I worked for was selling million or tens of million of units per year. So in such cases it's easy to see why BOM costs trump the SW costs of a few licences, and why HW companies would like to keep chips costs down and charging you per SW license.

If you haven't shipped million of products in embedded and only worked in SW development, it's easy to get a warped picture of reality.

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

#150

Post by pushcx »

This title and premise are incorrect. It's not a bait-and-switch unless the bait was unavailable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch Vivado really was available free. There's a lot of potential criticisms one could write of the decision to change that (and basically all of them were made in this and the previous thread), but bait-and-switch is not one of them.
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