5/24/2026 at 5:03:01 AM
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
by akarambir
5/24/2026 at 8:35:22 AM
The official replies started off by addressing ... the "unacceptable abusive behavior towards AMD". The most important thing here is obviously to ask people not to use such hurtful words as "disgraceful" towards poor little AMD...Answering the actual question seems not a high priority
by mort96
5/24/2026 at 10:32:29 AM
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? Especially when to company has just announced changes that limit what users can do with their products.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.
by bborud
5/24/2026 at 1:49:38 PM
> 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 enforcing the rules is forum management 101. It’s getting silly that people are attacking this person specifically for just doing their job.
by Aurornis
5/24/2026 at 4:16:39 PM
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.
by bborud
5/24/2026 at 4:55:29 PM
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 (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… :)
by hluska
5/24/2026 at 7:24:39 PM
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.
by bborud
5/25/2026 at 10:19:17 AM
> Communication is tricky because it isn’t just about the words, but how they landPlease 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.
by spaqin
5/25/2026 at 12:45:52 AM
People can be abused, corporations can't. They aren't living things.by throwaway85825
5/24/2026 at 2:28:05 PM
> 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.
by Dylan16807
5/24/2026 at 3:00:38 PM
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.
by Aurornis
5/24/2026 at 5:57:24 PM
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.
by dangus
5/24/2026 at 7:38:46 PM
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.
by wormius
5/24/2026 at 10:35:36 PM
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.
by dangus
5/26/2026 at 8:51:39 AM
> 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.Then don't take the job.
by account42
5/26/2026 at 8:10:39 PM
Not everyone has the luxury you do.Can you imagine if everyone who had to put up with this bullshit for shit wages, did what you said. Good luck with services.
by wormius
5/27/2026 at 6:22:42 AM
The people that take those jobs usually don't find them extremely stressful.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.
by Dylan16807
5/24/2026 at 8:50:28 PM
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.
by bigbadfeline
5/24/2026 at 11:33:56 PM
I matters taste, the customer is always right.by edoceo
5/25/2026 at 6:26:11 AM
be more resilient.end of story.
by NamlchakKhandro
5/24/2026 at 4:03:48 PM
I disagree that enforcing civility means that, especially if mkru's comments are considered too uncivil.by Dylan16807
5/24/2026 at 10:25:25 PM
They were very sweary.by esquivalience
5/24/2026 at 11:18:55 PM
Nothing about swearing inherently constitutes abuse.by angoragoats
5/25/2026 at 12:43:30 AM
Tone policing is a common distraction from addressing the point and a useful diversion from making unflattering admissions.by throwaway85825
5/24/2026 at 11:37:24 AM
> 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 upsetTypical 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.
by nubinetwork
5/24/2026 at 1:53:19 PM
> 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.
by Aurornis
5/26/2026 at 8:59:12 AM
If customer support employees don't want to deal with angry customers they should take a job whose purpose is not dealing with unhappy customers. If you as a company have too many angry customers the response should be to fix your product/service, not to find excuses to ignore those customers.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.
by account42
5/24/2026 at 4:17:59 PM
Was the anger directed at the moderator?by bborud
5/24/2026 at 2:14:08 PM
[dead]by cindyllm
5/24/2026 at 1:10:49 PM
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 …by jagged-chisel
5/24/2026 at 1:34:07 PM
[flagged]by PearlRiver
5/25/2026 at 6:29:08 AM
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.
by NamlchakKhandro
5/24/2026 at 8:49:43 AM
Some people, including the management of most big corporations, claim that verbal insults, which do no actual physical harm to anyone, are "unacceptable abusive behavior", while the actions that do physical harm to others, e.g. by tricking or forcing them to pay an extra part of their hard-earned money for things that should not have been paid, because they had already been paid in another form, instead of using that money for worthy purposes, are not "unacceptable abusive behavior".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.
by adrian_b
5/24/2026 at 9:01:03 AM
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 clearly just putting on a performance here though, using the backlash they get as a weapon.
by Drakim
5/24/2026 at 9:11:07 AM
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".by mort96
5/25/2026 at 7:13:54 AM
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.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo
5/24/2026 at 10:26:42 AM
It would be more accurate to say that what AMD is doing is causing material harm, while a few mean words directed towards an anonymous megacorp are not.by RobotToaster
5/24/2026 at 11:56:02 AM
The replies here are horrifying. Yes corporations are not people. But they are made up of people. I'd imagine most here work in them yourselves. Often less well paid support staff who have to read, and try to respond, to such terrible behavior. As one of those support people myself I can assure you it takes a toll.by tekchip
5/24/2026 at 3:33:08 PM
Do you genuinely think that support staff reads "this decision made by AMD is disgraceful" and feel personally attacked because they identify as "part of AMD" and therefore an attack on AMD's honor is an attack on theirs?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.
by mort96
5/26/2026 at 9:05:11 AM
The entire point of support staff is to stand between unhappy customers and the rest of the company. If they don't think their pay reflects the responsibilities that that entails then they should ask for a raise, not make excuses to ignore customers that the company has failed to serve.by account42
5/24/2026 at 9:39:17 AM
Its just numbers only for rich. For poor ir can be the differnce between employability and not. In general, I believe that non-free tools like this are effective violence against poor nations since they trap those societies in unskilled sectors.by alphabeta3r56
5/25/2026 at 12:56:37 AM
Poor nations just pirate.by throwaway85825
5/24/2026 at 9:11:36 AM
AMD is not a person. It has no emotions. Any perceived emotional harm by humans is them projecting themselves onto the AMD entity. Whereas AMDs actions here cause real harm to individuals.by cumshitpiss
5/24/2026 at 12:54:01 PM
AMD and any other corpo is made of people, who do have emotions. Abuse towards these people impacts corp operations. This is an entity protecting itself from damage that it feels is not worth the benefit the offering would bring.And I question your assertion of real harm to individuals, by not offering free support, being worse than receiving verbal abuse.
by speff
5/24/2026 at 3:12:58 PM
Right, but saying "this policy change is disgraceful" and saying "you, customer support person, are an insufferable dickhead" are very different things. From what I can see in the link comments, people seem to be saying mostly the former.by stavros
5/24/2026 at 2:31:12 PM
Was the abuse and response directed at a person or AMD? Even AMDs response is vague and deflects it as “Abuse towards AMD”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
by cumshitpiss
5/24/2026 at 10:51:40 AM
> claim that verbal insults, which do no actual physical harm to anyone, are "unacceptable abusive behavior"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.
by makeitdouble
5/24/2026 at 12:00:34 PM
There are still individuals, who make up the company, who have to read and try to formulate responses to said abusive behavior. It's usually the lower paid support staff not the engineers or C suite who have those duties. As one of those people I can confirm it absolutely takes a toll.by tekchip
5/24/2026 at 4:50:55 PM
Nah, feel free to insult any company I have worked for or even the company that I am one of the founders of. I don't see why that should be off limits. But do not insult me as a person.by jeltz
5/24/2026 at 1:52:34 PM
I'll come your place of work and hurl abuse at you all day. Let's see if you find it harmful or not by the end of the week.by basisword
5/27/2026 at 5:46:58 AM
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?
by musicale
5/24/2026 at 11:22:53 AM
> Answering the actual question seems not a high priorityThis 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.
by shevy-java
5/24/2026 at 10:08:09 AM
Yeah that was hilarious, pretty much instantly closed the tab when I read that.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?!
by matheusmoreira
5/24/2026 at 9:40:34 AM
Probably a good thing I don't run a company, because I wouldn't put energy into responding to the kind of comments they're addressing. If you use a support channel the same way a teenager uses Reddit, you should count to ten and try again later.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)"
by jeroenhd
5/24/2026 at 10:43:51 AM
You're kind of doing the job for them here by inventing a connection between Linux and "simple, entry-level needs". Plenty of Linux users have "simple, entry-level needs"; nothing about using Windows automatically makes you needs simpler. If that is indeed their argument, they ought to have spelled it out.by mort96
5/24/2026 at 10:17:05 AM
> In other words, they're saying hobbyists and beginners are on Windows anywayI 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.
by robinsonb5
5/27/2026 at 5:53:40 AM
"Well, some guy in marketing figured that we could make more money by charging more money, especially for things that we didn't previously charge money for. This was validated by ChatGPT as the kind of brilliant insight that qualifies someone for an MBA. You may take some solace in the fact that we somehow managed to preserve a free version for broke idiots who use Windows."by musicale
5/24/2026 at 11:54:02 AM
I don't know anything about this situation, but basic logic says if you want someone to give you free stuff, be nice to them.It wouldn't surprise me if AMD is scaling back their free offerings due to the impact on support.
by jmull
5/24/2026 at 12:16:10 PM
> It wouldn't surprise me if AMD is scaling back their free offerings due to the impact on support.They’re welcome to hamstring themselves in the market; it’s just not a smart move.
by gilrain
5/24/2026 at 3:39:03 PM
Who are the alternatives to Xilinx on the high end currently? Altera? Lattice and the others make comparatively small FPGAs IIRC.by ThrowawayR2
5/24/2026 at 12:00:10 PM
Those students and hobbyists often end up in jobs where they are involved in multi million dollar purchasing decisions.AMD’s MBA types extinguish that early mindshare at their own peril.
by bigfatkitten
5/28/2026 at 12:30:55 PM
MBAs are mercenaries, that's part of their formation. They fully expect to be working somewhere else when things start looking bad.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.
by folbec
5/24/2026 at 9:37:17 AM
Yeah this is such an own goal. You want students using your code to get them to use it in job. They have learnt nothing from cudaby alphabeta3r56
5/24/2026 at 9:42:08 AM
They still have a system for sponsoring students (through professors). They're not entirely crazy.It does make me wonder how much money they must be losing on these chips that they've turned this desperate for licensing costs.
by jeroenhd
5/24/2026 at 4:10:45 PM
Yes, but that’s resistance for potential users they can’t afford if they ever want adoption on the level of CUDA.by chaostheory
5/25/2026 at 1:00:44 AM
Usually it's just some idiot manager trying to juice quarterly numbers and get promoted. Then they jump to another company and the damage takes years to kick in.by throwaway85825
5/27/2026 at 6:05:46 AM
They have learnt... very slightly more than nothing from CUDA.by musicale
5/24/2026 at 8:46:18 AM
When they do not have any justifiable answer, or don't want to answer, but need to keep the facade on, they'll sidestep and tell you how hard they are working on something, and how many unrelated things they've archived.- A regular tactic used by our former autocratic ruler, or most corrupted people
by t_mahmood
5/24/2026 at 10:27:48 AM
> For your specific question: Why is Linux not supported in the BASIC tier?> 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.
by DoctorOW
5/24/2026 at 12:41:44 PM
I think many haven't read that part, as it is hidden by default and one have to expand the answer to see it. At least that was what happened to me... I didn't noticed it until you pointed it out.by cfinnberg
5/24/2026 at 11:54:06 AM
One would've thought they had learned from their supposed driver superiority over Nvidia due to embracing Linux users with OSS driversby petterroea
5/24/2026 at 12:02:20 PM
I guess FPGA division (nee Xilinx, which was always a bit sketchy, even if they had best silicon) doesn't learn much from the GPU division.by tliltocatl
5/24/2026 at 5:56:07 PM
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 ( <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.
by ua709
5/24/2026 at 8:11:14 PM
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.
by lpribis
5/24/2026 at 9:30:10 PM
> 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. :)
P.S. If you're a hobbyist who wants to make an ASIC... https://www.tinytapeout.com
by ua709
5/25/2026 at 6:51:24 AM
> 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.
by hardolaf
5/25/2026 at 9:38:41 AM
Are you sure you actually know what you're talking about?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.
by imtringued
5/27/2026 at 1:09:59 PM
I'm not sure it's quite as clean cut as you say. FPGA's have a 10x penalty in area due to the extra routing wires they need.Also, it seems like the node that Xilinx has been using lately (28 nm) isn't as cutting edge as it used to be.
by thijson
5/25/2026 at 2:38:17 PM
> Just use a microcontroller. And for the vast majority of hobby projects I suspect that is good advice.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.
by Mr-Frog
5/24/2026 at 11:34:46 AM
But amd doesn't need you, all they care about is ai. https://youtu.be/uJcf2UGCH1wby nubinetwork
5/24/2026 at 7:57:12 AM
[flagged]by izacus
5/24/2026 at 8:04:26 AM
What you say is ridiculous.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.
by adrian_b
5/24/2026 at 9:38:56 AM
[flagged]by izacus
5/24/2026 at 9:18:11 AM
[flagged]by charcircuit
5/24/2026 at 11:39:55 PM
No, it's not "on the Linux community" to bribe a company out of releasing hardware in a broken state of usability.by Dylan16807
5/25/2026 at 12:44:51 AM
It's no more a bribe than having to pay money to buy the latest C++ standard when implementing a C++ compiler. The reality is that companies pay each other for partnerships all of the time. There is value to AMD for keeping this documentation secret and there is value for having control over what design tools exist for them. 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.The hardware is not in a broken state of usability since you can still buy usable design software.
by charcircuit
5/25/2026 at 1:23:45 AM
> 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 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.
by Dylan16807
5/25/2026 at 2:45:54 AM
>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 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.
by charcircuit
5/25/2026 at 5:49:38 AM
> 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.
by Dylan16807
5/25/2026 at 6:44:56 AM
>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.
by charcircuit
5/25/2026 at 4:06:51 PM
I'm not at all calling it worthless. It's very valuable. But I think it's a value that every owner deserves access to. And for IP licensing? If it's mandatory companies will figure it out.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.
by Dylan16807
5/25/2026 at 9:59:47 AM
>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.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?
by imtringued
5/25/2026 at 9:50:53 AM
What kind of logic is this?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.
by imtringued
5/24/2026 at 1:56:27 PM
[flagged]by pocksuppet
5/25/2026 at 9:55:09 AM
> Reverse engineering tools are pretty good these days.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.
by aleph_minus_one
5/25/2026 at 12:04:58 PM
You can just do it. They can't catch you. Don't put your real name on the project, and for extra paranoia, use a VPN, and you're fine.Most things worth doing are illegal, like founding Uber.
by pocksuppet
5/24/2026 at 2:03:04 PM
Because most don't want to work on something big, with a high risk of being sued into oblivion once released?by lukan
5/24/2026 at 2:39:20 PM
It's a pretty low risk if you don't put your identity out there. I know there's at least one Git forge that's a Tor onion service. Even on GitHub 99% of the time this ends with a DMCA takedown of the repository. You should probably put it on a pseudonymous alt account but you don't actually need to use a Tor onion service.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."
by pocksuppet
5/24/2026 at 2:59:52 PM
"Doing the work is what's most important, and the rest can be figured out later."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.
by lukan
5/25/2026 at 3:46:54 AM
> You don't see people being like "I reverse-engineered Vivado but I won't give you a copy because I could get sued."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.
by rescbr
5/25/2026 at 1:49:39 PM
Case in point: People who downvote my comment instead of reverse engineering Vivado are actually proving it correct.by pocksuppet
5/24/2026 at 8:06:18 AM
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.
by tux3
5/24/2026 at 3:56:57 PM
And, since there's a pipeline from students and hobbyists to professional use, it's risking the future.by atq2119
5/24/2026 at 10:03:38 PM
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.by tardedmeme
5/24/2026 at 4:57:17 PM
Schools can join the AMD University Program and get back to where they were, and more. https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/university-program.htmlAs 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.
by ua709
5/24/2026 at 5:00:57 PM
And hurting AMD.by jeltz
5/24/2026 at 10:34:30 AM
Nah. Why do Windows users get it for free while I have to pay because I'm an "advanced" user?I'm not rewarding that. I'll reward companies like Valve instead.
by matheusmoreira
5/24/2026 at 11:25:10 AM
This tier of the tool is free on Windows.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)
by pjc50
5/24/2026 at 9:38:23 AM
[flagged]by izacus
5/24/2026 at 10:22:53 AM
The notion of being expected to pay for software that was formerly free - when Windows users aren't expected to bear those same costs - does indeed piss me off.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.
by robinsonb5
5/24/2026 at 10:21:54 AM
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].
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2012/06/26/155792590/orbitz-targets-mac-...
by pyrale
5/24/2026 at 12:04:26 PM
Maintaining software on Linux just takes more time and effort - due to less stability and number of distros.by izacus
5/24/2026 at 8:11:49 PM
AMD does maintain Linux anyway, for their paid tiers. It's not like they're saving money by dumping the free tier for Linux.by pyrale
5/24/2026 at 2:53:29 PM
AMD is making more than enough money from hardware sales to fund the software that actually makes is usable.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.
by pqtyw
5/24/2026 at 10:41:33 AM
I get what you're saying but I can understand the frustration here. Vivado licenses start at $1200/year or $5000 for a perpetual license.. Just to use software to work with hardware that you already paid for. And it's not like they are dropping support for Linux altogether, it would cost them nothing to continue supporting Linux in the free tier.It just seems like a weird decision on AMD's part.
by ktm5j