Vivado is software for designing hardware on an FPGA. AMD bought out Xilinx, one of the big FPGA manufacturers, a few years back. FPGAs are basically programmable digital circuits: you configure a series of internal logic gates to represent the function of a circuit with memory, data busses, registers, gates, etc. In this fashion, an FPGA could be programmed to function like a CPU, a radio, a video encoder, or nearly any other piece of digital hardware. Very useful for hobbyists and prototyping.

The thing with FPGA software is that there are no open source alternatives. FPGAs have so many complicated blobs and signing keys and proprietary IP blocks that your only choice is to use the manufacturer's offering.

I honestly think this is it, and it's not arbitrary. I think it's because really any build server will be running Linux (either natively or via Docker). AMD/Xilinx probably thinks "Build Servers are an advanced use case, so not covered under the free license"

What do you use instead ? As a student, the new prices are completely unaffordable, and I am not going to use Windows 😓

What do you mean by this kind of shit? I am in the FPGA space for quite some time now but I don't think something like this happened before. When did you leave and what are you using now? I agree with you on the support. If there isn't an (unpaid) member in the community forum or on some other platform you are pretty much fucked. I never used another vendor, so I can't say if it is different there though.

I am very much pro open-source, but these are highly specialized tools for a very niche market so it is atleast somewhat understandable. Unfortunately we are not blessed with open source toolchains like software developers even though there are some steps in that direction. Because it is such a niche market, it is like the software space from 20-30 years ago. Proprietary tools and compilers were pretty common back then and for some microcontroller architectures outside of ARM and RISCV they still are I think.

That's the second-best approach. The best approach is for it to be copyleft instead of permissively-licensed to begin with.

I would like to preface this with the fact that I hate this new change. As a professional FPGA Engineer, who has exclusively used Xilinx parts for most of my career, I figured I'd offer my two cents.

Vivado was never open source to begin with. So I don't see how this would allow more back doors to be in the program, and I'm also not sure what you mean by a back door in this context. Do you mean making Vivado install back doors into the bitstreams themselves? If so, this would be difficult to do given there are independent tools out there that allow you to verify what is in the compiled netlist (which is an intermediate step in a design) vs the HDL (Hardware Description Language, the type of Language that is used to program FPGAs, main ones are VHDL and Verilog). There's also some new tools coming out do compare the bitstream against the net list. With these tools, you can all but guarantee there aren't any back doors or Trojans in the design.

Vivado is also already export controlled IIRC. At the very least, you've always had to input your country/address/etc due to controls on it. I'm in the USA, so it's never been a problem, so I don't really know what happens for people in, say, China. It might just be for logging/tracking purposes, and then in the future it could get locked down, so you may be right on that count.

I propose when AMD does this we call it an "AMD 1".

This is more against Intel, but yes. AMD is the master of snatching defeat from jaws of victory.

But then why is it still free on Windows? Remove the basic tier entirely, then.

Especially if you're correct that is a server/client system, then someone will just soon up a Docker container that has all of Windows 11 LTE and the Windows version of this pre-configured, so people can continue to use it in Linux anyway, or switch to an open-source alternative. They're already supporting and releasing Linux builds, so this doesn't seem to gain them anything and, instead, may cost them marketshare and goodwill.

I'm confused.

so of course they are going to start charging for it

It's a giant fuck you to Linux users as AMD only charges Linux users; AMD doesn't charge Windows users for the entry-level tier.

It uses resources on their end, so they need to bill for it to make it make sense

Doesn't AMD sell the hardware? Isn't it end-users (or companies or whatever) that are running the hardware? So I'm a bit confused, what do you mean by AI dipshits "using" AMD's resources -- especially when it's still available for free on Windows?