The article is very misleading, but the real gist is that all of these AI dipshits figured out what FPGA was, and are now flooding the zone to use it. This tool has been an absolute gift to companies looking to move to FPGA for things like ML workflows, NL processing, and semantic flows, WITHOUT needing the dumb shit GPU pricing. Better results, cheaper bills.

AMD is two steps ahead of the game in these arenas versus Nvidia, and people just figured it out, so of course they are going to start charging for it. It uses resources on their end, so they need to bill for it to make it make sense. The same way every dumbass startup gives shit away to get you hooked is the way this works.

FPGA is going to usurp the reliance on CUDA in a massive way in the next few years, and they want to get paid for the upfront work they put in to make this possible.

Not shocked at all.

I recently saw this and it pissed me off so much. I use vivado for my engineering coursework and when I found out they dropped Linux support for the 2026.1 version it does sting a little.

I don't blame them for doing it, my immediate reaction to the news was people were taking advantage of vivado who weren't actually students so I completely understand there stance, I just wish there was another way...

the article is quite misleading describing it as a "bait-and-switch." It is not a bait and switch, this is a reasonable stance of which if I were working at amd in the FPGA line I too would make that decision to pull the free version of vivado/vitis away from Linux. Whether or not you believe that is up to you.

anyways, as much as I do respect amd's decision I have moved away to f4pga which is an open source fpga toolchain. doesn't have much device support as you may get with vivado (7-series, and a few other microcontroller brands) but it offers enough for my use case.

That fork is gonna grow is what's gonna happen now