[akarambir]

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

[mort96]

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

[bborud]

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.

[Aurornis]

> 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.

[bborud]

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.

[hluska]

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… :)

[bborud]

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.

[throwaway85825]

People can be abused, corporations can't. They aren't living things.

[Dylan16807]

> 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.

[Aurornis]

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.

[dangus]

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.

[Dylan16807]

I disagree that enforcing civility means that, especially if mkru's comments are considered too uncivil.

[esquivalience]

They were very sweary.

[angoragoats]

Nothing about swearing inherently constitutes abuse.

[nubinetwork]

> 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

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.

[Aurornis]

> 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.

[account42]

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.

[bborud]

Was the anger directed at the moderator?

[jagged-chisel]

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 …

[PearlRiver]

[flagged]

[NamlchakKhandro]

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.

[adrian_b]

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.

[Drakim]

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.

[mort96]

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".

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

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.

[RobotToaster]

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.

[tekchip]

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.

[mort96]

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.

[account42]

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.

[alphabeta3r56]

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.

[throwaway85825]

Poor nations just pirate.

[cumshitpiss]

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.

[speff]

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.

[stavros]

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.

[cumshitpiss]

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

[makeitdouble]

> 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.

[tekchip]

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.

[jeltz]

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.

[basisword]

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.

[musicale]

    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?

seems about right

[shevy-java]

> Answering the actual question seems not a high priority

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.

[matheusmoreira]

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?!

[jeroenhd]

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)"

[mort96]

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.

[robinsonb5]

> In other words, they're saying hobbyists and beginners are on Windows anyway

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.

[musicale]

"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."

[jmull]

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.

[gilrain]

> 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.

[ThrowawayR2]

Who are the alternatives to Xilinx on the high end currently? Altera? Lattice and the others make comparatively small FPGAs IIRC.

[bigfatkitten]

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.

[folbec]

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.

[alphabeta3r56]

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 cuda

[jeroenhd]

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.

[chaostheory]

Yes, but that’s resistance for potential users they can’t afford if they ever want adoption on the level of CUDA.

[throwaway85825]

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.

[musicale]

They have learnt... very slightly more than nothing from CUDA.

[t_mahmood]

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

[DoctorOW]

> 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.

[cfinnberg]

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.

[petterroea]

One would've thought they had learned from their supposed driver superiority over Nvidia due to embracing Linux users with OSS drivers

[tliltocatl]

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.

[ua709]

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.

[lpribis]

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.

[ua709]

> 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. :)

https://atomicsemi.com

P.S. If you're a hobbyist who wants to make an ASIC... https://www.tinytapeout.com

[hardolaf]

> 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.

[imtringued]

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.

[thijson]

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.

[Mr-Frog]

> 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.

[nubinetwork]

But amd doesn't need you, all they care about is ai. https://youtu.be/uJcf2UGCH1w