What a dog move!
Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
201–210 of 254 posts
Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's no more a bribe than having to pay money to buy the latest C++ standard when implementing a C++ compiler. The C++ standard group didn't just sell me a piece of hardware that only runs C++, in a world where no free C++ compilers exist. That analogy isn't even close. > There is value to AMD for keeping this documentation secret It's a value that doesn't deserve respect. > It makes sense that AMD would want to be…
>That analogy isn't even close. Then how about the instruction manuals for the processors themselves. It's really not that different. People spend a lot of time and resources building something and compiling information and you are demanding to get it for free. >It's a value that doesn't deserve respect. It does deserve respect as a lot of people put in work in creating it and creating a successful product. If you th…
> Then how about the instruction manuals for the processors themselves.
Those should come with the processor.
> People spend a lot of time and resources building something and compiling information and you are demanding to get it for free.
Documentation for a product should always be "free" when you buy that product.
Which is far from being "free" in the normal sense of the word.
> It does deserve respect as a lot of people put in work in creating it and creating a successful product. If you think it's not that much effort to do then find someone to make their own FPGA and documentation for it.
I respect the effort. I don't respect the competitive advantage gained by withholding documentation.
Was my meaning that unclear? I quoted the exact thing I don't respect.
> It is rare for a business to be so 1 dimensional. Businesses have many income streams. Even for the same product. Take for example the iPhone. Apple gets income from people buying the device. Income from companies for letting them sell things in the App Store. Income from Google for setting Google as the default search provider.
Some of those streams are more acceptable than others. Apple's income from Google is fine. Their income from the App Store would be fine if it wasn't mandatory, and is much less fine when it is mandatory. Paid documentation is pretty far into bad territory.
> If you refuse to get a compatible computer for the free software to flash the chips then you can't flash the chips for free. The chips are still fully functional and if you sold them to someone else they could program them.
In this case you can get Windows.
What if they stopped having the free Windows version either? Because the way you're talking about this situation it sounds like you would also call that acceptable.
Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
#203Earlier 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…
be more resilient.
end of story.
Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems we have an awful lot of snowflakes in the corporate tech world the last couple years. Can’t take criticism, can’t handle basic questioning of their operation …
[flagged]
not sure why you're downvot... yes i do.
You raise an important topic.
Way too many people not going through initiation of adult hood, leaning into their grandiose inner thoughts.
Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
>That analogy isn't even close. Then how about the instruction manuals for the processors themselves. It's really not that different. People spend a lot of time and resources building something and compiling information and you are demanding to get it for free. >It's a value that doesn't deserve respect. It does deserve respect as a lot of people put in work in creating it and creating a successful product. If you th…
> Then how about the instruction manuals for the processors themselves. Those should come with the processor. > People spend a lot of time and resources building something and compiling information and you are demanding to get it for free. Documentation for a product should always be "free" when you buy that product. Which is far from being "free" in the normal sense of the word. > It does deserve respect as a lot of…
>Those should come with the processor.
They are useless for most people who buy the processor, even transitively. For people who will get called out of it, it makes sense to let companies charge for that value.
>Documentation for a product should always be "free" when you buy that product.
I feel this viewpoint does not value the work it takes to compile all of this information. Nor does it acknowledge how full documentation could reveal sensitive information. There is no reason for consumers to need to know how microcode instructions work since they will never be able to properly sign a microcode update. People will always like getting valuable stuff for free so you can't justify something by looking at how happy people are by getting value for free.
This also gets into a potential slippery slope where things like schematics or repair information, or even source code is forced to be given away for free. Confidential IP is a common part of many businesses and offers a tangible competitive advantage.
>I don't respect the competitive advantage gained by withholding documentation. Was my meaning that unclear?
What I was implying is that by forcing people to give up their hard work for free you are calling their work worthless. Finding innovative ways to make a product better deserves to be rewarded.
>Because the way you're talking about this situation it sounds like you would also call that acceptable.
I do think it's acceptable. I also think it's acceptable for them to charge money to sell you a programmer to use with the chip too. I don't think they have to give you the physical hardware to flash it with every chip they send you.
Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
> 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.
You have absolutely no idea what an ASIC costs compared to a FPGA. A FPGA that can compete with a tinytapeout chip costs a few dollars at most in extremely low quantites. Something high performance would need probably TSMC 12nm or similar at a minimum. At that point, you're talking $1M+ between licensing fees and direct costs to just go on a shuttle. If you want to make your own higher volume run or can't wait for shuttle spot, you're looking easily $5-10M minimum for your first 6 wafers. Comparatively, FPGAs competitive with TSMC 12nm run from a few hundred dollars up to several thousand dollars each. So for low volume, they're very competitive.
Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
#207As a long time Altera user, one of the biggest things that made me want to jump the fence to Xilinx was the MUCH stronger community and hobbyist uptake. Xilinx benefitted from a ton of people out there educating others on their behalf. Trying to shrink that community seems like a pretty obvious error. The closest thing the Altera world ever had were the old Altera user forums, which were a gold-mine. Intel shut them…
As someone who actually worked for one of the largest FPGA consumers in the world, Xilinx didn't benefit at all from the community and hobbyist uptake. It was just an unnecessary expense and distraction that got in the way of their core mission. Around 5-10 companies make up around 70% of all FPGA silicon sales and the single largest end user is the U.S. Government and its customers (NATO members, Israel, Australia, Japan, South Korea, etc.). Now that cloud took off, FPGAs are somewhat more used in cloud deployments but usually as a stopgap measure until an ASIC can be developed. And putting the lines on the football field has finally stopped being one of the largest consumers because the broadcasters finally learned that they can load new programming onto the FPGAs instead of just ordering new hardware every time something changes.
Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't help that just to start out you are looking at a 110+ GB size for their tools, which as far as anyone can tell, isn't really justified by anything.
That's because in the EDA space, they have horrible software practices. Take the worst you can imagine and then go worse from there. So eventually, when things "appear to work" they end up taking a snapshot of a messy directory and calling that the deliverable asset.
No, it's just all of the device models. Even the OSS tools take up almost 20 GB of space once you get all of the suppported device models which is not many compared to what Vivado supports.
Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your point (that AMD does a lot more harm than what they are indignant about) but not the way you go there. If emotional abusive behavior is not "physical harm" because it's just emotions, then financial abusive behavior is not "physical harm" either because it's just numbers. When you consider what incredible harm being emotionally unwell can lead to, I don't think it deserves to be dismissed. AMD is cl…
Yea insulting and being verbally abusive towards individuals is something that it's worth taking action against. My problem with AMD's response is simply that they take issue with "bad language or abusive behavior towards AMD ".
NGL that phrase reads as an "ESL-ism" where the intended phrasing is "towards AMD moderators/employees/whatever" i.e. "Don't be a dick to the people trying to help/answer questions" not "don't be mean to the company".
Other quirks with their writing style seem to lend support to this being an "ESL-ism" as well.
Re: Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
#210As long as guys with ties get away with it, it will keep happening.