Many HNers promised to pay if developers bring their software to Linux - will that actually happen?
The only reason why the "Linux community" cannot create adequate FPGA design tools is that the vendors like AMD refuse to document the necessary details of their products.
A few old AMD FPGAs have been reversed engineered, e.g. some ARTIX-7, so for them there is no need for the rather bad AMD tools, but for most AMD formerly Xilinx FPGAs it is impossible to create better tools for lack of documentation.
As long as AMD refuses to provide the technical documentation required to use their products, it should have been a legal obligation to at least provide basic tools that allows the buyer of such products to actually use "FPGAs", i.e. to "field-program" them, as the name of the sold product claims.
Like many other FPGA developers, I could write myself better FPGA development tools than what AMD provides, if I had access to the complete FPGA technical documentation to which only a few big companies have access, a restriction whose only possible purpose is to prevent competition in the FPGA market.
If AMD had documented the exact format of the bit stream required to program each model of their FPGAs and the complete timing consequences of each synthesis choice, nobody would need any FPGA simulation or synthesis tool provided by AMD in Vivado.
Because people haven't offered enough money to have a copy privately shared. This is on the Linux community for not ponying up enough money to fund this properly to have a reasonable release date.
The hardware is not in a broken state of usability since you can still buy usable design software.
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 compensated in this case and would not want to do work for free which could undermine their business.
Their business is selling the hardware. Their money should come from selling the hardware.
I'm not demanding a free full-featured development environment. I think they should have to document the hardware and maybe provide a basic compiler. If they want to sell something beyond that, no problem.
> The hardware is not in a broken state of usability since you can still buy usable design software.
And if you don't?
It's a fixable broken state with enough money, but it's still a broken state.
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 think it's not that much effort to do then find someone to make their own FPGA and documentation for it.
>Their business is selling the hardware. Their money should come from selling the hardware.
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.
>And if you don't?
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.
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.
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.
If your competitive advantage needs you to not even release documentation, does it really? Really? Well the societal benefits are more important, sorry.
And it's still not giving up work for free. It's telling companies to sell these two things together.
A physical programmer is different because those have a marginal cost.
x86_64 processors maintain backwards compatibility. This means you can reverse engineer one chip and then have your software work on a different processor from a different company.
FPGAs don't even retain compatibility between different sizes of the same base model. If you reverse engineer one chip that's only one chip.
>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'm not sure why companies and online forum people defending the company are so obsessed with making their products less valuable, driving away customers and making less money in the long run. The financial incentives point exactly in the opposite direction.
>It is rare for a business to be so 1 dimensional. Businesses have many income streams
Why does it matter if it is rare? The only thing that matters is that you're making money. Why do I have to explain this?
Nvidia obtained a 5 trillion market by selling the hardware and giving the software to program and run on it away for free. Why do you hate it when AMD makes money?
Linux developers are supposed to build their own software and to do so they have to pay AMD for documentation under an NDA that prevents them from developing an open source toolchain?
What kind of logic is that? This is especially stupid since AMD benefits from every single FPGA sale so all they did was reduce the number of FPGAs they will sell, by locking out customers.
Reverse engineering tools are pretty good these days. I have no doubt that a dedicated hacker could sit down with Ghidra and the free Windows version of Vivado for two years and come out with something that compiles FPGAs well enough. But there's a shortage of the kinds of people who would do that, they're all busy doing other things, so it doesn't get done.
More easily, someone could get the free Windows version to run on Linux. If it doesn't already work in Wine, they could figure out and implement the needed Wine patches. If Vivado has a DRM scheme they could break it (potentially very difficult), if not then it should be straightforward. Nobody seems to be doing that, either.
The same applies to things like the Nvidia drivers.
In the past, freedom RE projects were handicapped by needing to maintain a Chinese wall. Now it's become obvious you don't need a Chinese wall, you can just straight up decompile someone else's software and use that as a reference as long as you don't copy it directly and you don't make it too obvious to the copyright owners what you're doing. Keeping your anonymity for this sort of project is easier than ever before too. Yet we see less freedom RE projects, not more. Why is that?
You could also get someone else to put their name on the web hosting and so on. Don't know who exactly, but there are a lot more people willing to take legal risk of having reverse-engineered an FPGA toolchain, than people who can reverse-engineer an FPGA toolchain. Doing the work is what's most important, and the rest can be figured out later. But you don't even see that. You don't see people being like "I reverse-engineered Vivado but I won't give you a copy because I could get sued."
I would say for most people his means they won't start the work if they don't know whether there is a way. Also most people like to get credit for their work. So the number of people capable AND willing to work without getting credit is low. And that is not surprising to me.
It is not my skill set, but I certainly would not invest much into something like this.
Eh, not Vivado, but back in my undergrad days I RE/cracked a tool used in a very specific niche and definitely kept my mouth shut as the developers could a) do some investigation and then sue me, a student without any legal budget to spare; b) improve copy protection on future releases; and/or c) prevent my access to future versions of the tool that I was using for my thesis.
On other threads about Denuvo you always see somebody saying they've got the chops but the risk to their livelihoods is not worth it.
I think there are a lot of (now) hobbyist reverse-engineers that learned the craft back in the day and kept the knowledge for themselves.
The problem is not the technological knowledge, but the legally complicated situation.
Rule of thumb: if you are looking for an evil in the world, it's usually written down in the laws.
Most things worth doing are illegal, like founding Uber.
This is just hurting students and hobbyists.
As for hobbyists, in the world of $0.03 microcontrollers, strong competition on the low end from Chinese manufacturers, and where few people learn HDLs, is NRE money in the hobby market really money well spent?
I'm a HW designer and even I use microcontrollers now for most things, but not everything, because it's usually cheaper and faster.
With semiconductor prices coming down as far as they have I think the world has probably fundamentally changed for FPGAs and the niche they occupied is shrinking fast.
If I were actually using Xilinx FPGAs I'd be more pissed off. Luckily the projects that interest me currently are based around Intel, Lattice and Gowin devices.
It just seems like a weird decision on AMD's part.
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].
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2012/06/26/155792590/orbitz-targets-mac-...
Even Apple doesn't charge you for the software needed to actually be able to use their devices (well since around Snow Leopard or so, at least).
But I suppose the idea of not being as greedy as possible really "pisses off" AMD's executives (and presumably some of the people shilling for them here).
And presumably you didn't read the article since AMD will continue to support this on Linux anyway.
I'm not rewarding that. I'll reward companies like Valve instead.
It might be a fair criticism that Linux users don't pay for software, but being a dick about it isn't going to get you anywhere.
(It's weird to see people on HN shilling for AMD against Linux, though. Very astroturf flavored)
Answering the actual question seems not a high priority
The older I get the less I want to deal with companies that act like primadonnas and the technologies they make. This is also why I don’t do phone apps: your market access is 100% controlled by two companies that can wipe out your business overnight.
Imagine having to work with these people professionally. With real money involved. While probably not as high risk as mobile development, their customer representatives seem like real primadonnas. You’ll be happier without these people in your life.
Typical phone CSR boilover from covid days. Most places I call these days have a message saying that they will hang up on you if you act pissy.
When I had some influence over customer support at a company once I set a similar expectation. We didn’t advertise it up front but if a customer was being abusive over support channels they could be cut off.
Big morale boost for customer support. Abusive customers are rare but they can think it’s their job to attack, threaten, and be uncivil. Being stuck in a position where you’re forced to placate angry man-children sucks.
It’s sad that there are so many comments here trying to attack the forum moderator for moderating the forum.
This person had no hand in the decision making. No reason to treat them as an outlet for anger.
All you're doing to forcing your customers to find other ways to fix their problems - either by finding someone higher paid than customer support and wasting their time instead or by going to a competitor and telling everyone to do the same.
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 enforcing the rules is forum management 101. It’s getting silly that people are attacking this person specifically for just doing their job.
_Professionals_ de-escalate. This was not that.
* 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 (any Vivado version prior 2026.1) and develop using free Vivado ML Standard Edition.*
If so, I have a different take on this. It could have been worded better, but I don’t think Anatoli is a native English speaker. Based upon a reply to @mkru, I also don’t think they have much visibility into marketing or if they do, they’re not very interested.
* For your specific question: Why is Linux not supported in the BASIC tier?
This is AMD's marketing decision.*
None of this is great, but English isn’t the easiest language to learn and de-escalation involves a specific speech pattern. And of everything they said in the answers I’ve found, ‘this is AMD’s marketing decision’ is the most blunt. Everything else has more information attached except for the little takedown at the beginning.
I know that’s a lot of words to say that I think belittling is a little strong. But brevity is a juicy topic… :)
- 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.
Please mind that English is not my native language, but as I aged, I found that to be true less and less. Exact word choice does not matter as long as the intent is conveyed properly. With some leeway, maybe benefit of the doubt. And misunderstandings can be cleared up.
In this case, customers are unhappy with the decision. No amount of weaseling around with any kind of word combination is not changing the decision. Whatever tone he might have used here would not help anyone or clear up anything. There is no further misunderstanding.
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.
It means the company cares more about their employees than sacrificing them in favor of maybe getting a few more sales from angry customers.
Also, corporations don’t have feelings. They aren’t people. They are legal structures. No comments made were directed at moderators or employees.
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.
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.
They have no authority or knowledge of the topic at hand at all but can’t resist weighing in and throwing authority around.
end of story.
Then don't take the job.
Can you imagine if everyone who had to put up with this bullshit for shit wages, did what you said. Good luck with services.
When you're including all the jobs with bad pay, the average person has a reasonable variety of options that are all flawed in different ways.
It wouldn't surprise me if AMD is scaling back their free offerings due to the impact on support.
That said, the tone and basic grammar of AMD's support rep isn't what I would've expected either.
They did answer the question, though:
> AMD expectation is that the BASIC tier licensing level is used for simple, entry‑level needs. While more advanced, production-based workflows are aligned with paid tiers.
In other words, they're saying hobbyists and beginners are on Windows anyway, and students can get a free version if they apply through the right channels. No more freebies.
AMD wants people to pay for their software. Instead of going "why are you bullying Linux users", AMD customers should probably be going "thank god the Windows version is still free (for now)"
I suspect they're massively underestimating how many hobbyists and students are on Linux. We're not talking about a typical demographic here, we're talking about people interested in computers and technology at precisely the level that Windows and MacOS aim to isolate from the user.
Obviously, I believe that a decision like that made by AMD now is a much more "unacceptable abusive behavior" than any kind of verbal insult ever known to mankind.
This kind of decision is a masked price rise of the AMD FPGAs that applies only to small businesses and individuals, while the big quasi-monopolistic companies are not affected, which will make competing with them even more difficult.
What annoys me most about this kind of policies aimed to hurt small businesses and individuals and favor big companies, which have become more and more frequent, is that in most cases they do not provide any financial benefit whatsoever to the company that enacts them, because they limit competition not in the market where that company activates, but in related markets.
However such policies are very beneficial for the entire class of people who are major shareholders, board members or executives in big companies, by ensuring that all markets are eventually dominated by few, which has happened especially after the end of the nineties of the past century, resulting in the current unhealthy economies of the Western countries and especially of USA.
This success of the quasi-monopolies has been caused by the lack of truly adequate consumer protection laws.
AMD is clearly just putting on a performance here though, using the backlash they get as a weapon.
Don't get me wrong, support staff often gets abuse thrown their way in a way that is absolutely not okay. There's a lot of people out there who get angry at the support personale. That's not what we're talking about here. Support staff needs thick enough skin to hear, "AMD did something bad" and not take it personally.
Other quirks with their writing style seem to lend support to this being an "ESL-ism" as well.
And I question your assertion of real harm to individuals, by not offering free support, being worse than receiving verbal abuse.
AMD is free to change their terms of their product, but then characterizing the backlash as abuse towards AMD is laughable. Have empathy for people not corporations
Which is true in a vacuum. Insulting _people_ is abusive behavior and shouldn't be accepted.
The issue here is the posts aren't insulting people, they're insulting a company, and a company can't be mentally abused.
Oh please mister, won't you please think of the little billion dollar corporation's feelings? They're only poor corporations with nothing to their names but their billion dollar businesses! Won't you think of the starving corporations?!
This is a clear sign of propaganda and bullshitting by them. Because answering the actual question would be easy, unless you deliberately want to harass linux users. Perhaps a Barbara Streisand effect kicks in, because people are now sharpening their ears and eyes as to why they harass linux users specifically.
I also have to admit that while my main operating system is linux, on my left side I have a windows computer too. I found this approach more practical, even though I think Linux is far superior to windows. This abuse by private entities to try to force everyone to use winows, is anonying to no ends though.
You raise an important topic.
Way too many people not going through initiation of adult hood, leaning into their grandiose inner thoughts.
You answer all the questions we do not ask.
Please answer the primary question this issue is about.
Why is Linux not supported in the BASIC tier?
- A regular tactic used by our former autocratic ruler, or most corrupted people
It does make me wonder how much money they must be losing on these chips that they've turned this desperate for licensing costs.
> This is AMD's marketing decision.
> Kind Regards,
> Anatoli Curran,
> Xilinx/AMD Forum Moderator
I mean, nobody in that forum necessarily knows why. It just came from above.
AMD’s MBA types extinguish that early mindshare at their own peril.
They are just doing what mercenaries have been doing for millennia : cost a lot in peace time, loot the population, and run away or cut a deal with the invader when the goings get though.
A good example is the Russian "Africa Corp" in Mali. Expensive, atrocities against the population and cut a deal with the jihadist to run away when they came last month.
"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 ( <1K units) is higher. But it is getting easier and cheaper everyday. And it's now feasible for small teams (say ~6) to do it. I think they need to look very hard at where they spend their NRE now to stay relevant and they need to start getting brutal because I am sure the amount of revenue they're bringing in is under serious attack.
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.
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.
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. :)
P.S. If you're a hobbyist who wants to make an ASIC... https://www.tinytapeout.com
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.
FPGA unit costs keep doing down and they usually tend to use a recent manufacturing process. Meanwhile the fixed NRE costs of ASICs keep going up the more advanced the manufacturing process is.
An FPGA consists of non programmable logic components such as DSPs, block RAM, NoCs, SERDES/configurable IO, that keep scaling with the manufacturing process.
If you try to replicate this with an older process to cut costs, you will have an area and energy efficiency penalty.
This means that FPGAs have become more relevant over time.
Also, it seems like the node that Xilinx has been using lately (28 nm) isn't as cutting edge as it used to be.
I recently bought a hobby FPGA kit because I think the Von Neumann model is a beautiful innovation and I want to learn more about doing useful computation tasks from the lowest level logical components. I've always been interested in computers, but when I was in grade school the only useful computers I could afford were discarded PCs that I brought back to life with Linux distros. I now have a fulfilling career as a direct result of access to cheap hardware and open-source software when I had much more time and much less money than I do now. Decisions like AMD's are a long-term negative for the industry.
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