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The "free" version of Vivado is used to develop for Xilinx/AMD's lower tier FPGAs. While offering what I assume are lower profit margins, these lower tier FPGAs make up a large portion of Xilinx/AMD's chip volume.

Xilinx/AMD charging for any of their tools is also a recent thing. 20 years ago, you could download these tools freely without even having to register on their website.

by fsh4 hours ago|

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Vivado is an IDE for programming AMD FPGAs. One cannot use it without buying AMD hardware.

by altairprime4 hours ago|

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Hardware isn’t where the margins are, and probably is somewhat of a loss leader for small-batch users; for hobby users I would hazard a guess that they’re running at around -10% profit on small sales to try and drive subscription revenue multipliers, and for already-paying users this change is essentially irrelevant and will have zero downside impact on sub revenue. Terrible way to run a profitable business if you fuck up the hardware undercut, but if you can get away with it, subscriptions are certainly a valid answer to maintenance of the platform over time. I still think they didn’t go far enough to make a meaningful dent in conversions from free to paying, though.

(Note that mention of Steam Linux is not about the games aspect, but about the Valve’s seeming plans to become a competitive target for Linux support to the exclusion of other consumer-focused miscellaneity. But I tend to go on about this too often, and shouldn’t have invoked it here, apologies.)

by awjlogan3 hours ago|

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This is not the case here as the software is required to use the hardware they’re selling at any quantity. The software is cost entirely for them, if you’re not buying the hardware you’re not using the software. Given they support Linux for the paid version, its development is already paid for. Absolutely say you won’t provide support for free tier users. Today’s free tier users are tomorrow’s purchasing managers. FPGA is not a big market, so you have to capture comparatively few people for each unit of market share. Good silicon without good software is just very expensive sand.

by rcxdude3 hours ago|

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I doubt that. Dev boards are often not very high margin despite their costs, but absolutely the majority of their profit is from hardware sales, not software licenses. Small volume customers are a combination of a long tail and a loss leader for a marketing pipeline, and FPGAs are almost by definition something where you can't ignore that part of the market (because you only use an FPGA if you can't use anything else and you don't have the volume/margin to justify an ASIC, so it's a niche of niches).

by tardedmeme2 hours ago|

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These chips scale up into the price range of $100,000 per chip, I'm not kidding. You really want someone to pick your $100k chip instead of Intel's $100k chip. A single high-end deal offsets the entire tool sales over the entire lifetime of Vivado.

It might be excusable that they want to vet their customers receiving the tool chain for the high end chips to avoid leaking trade secrets to Intel, but that isn't excusable for the low end. Someone who starts with your $10 chips is likely to develop brand loyalty and if they need $100k chips later, they'll be more likely to pick your ones.

by megous1 hours ago|

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Lol, AMD FPGA's the same chip can cost you from $2000 to $10000 depending on which channel you buy it from, or what relationship you have with AMD. Don't be ridiculous. This is an extreme margin business. And especially small time buyers are completely skinned and trimmed of all fat here. That's why many hobbyists are using unsoldered/re-used chips from accelerators or discarded smart network cards, or other second-hand whatever, repackaged in china by smart hands.

by adwn3 hours ago|

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> Hardware isn’t where the margins are

Baseless speculation

> probably is somewhat of a loss leader for small-batch users

Wrong. AMD/Xilinx doesn't sell devices directly to customers, they sell them to distributors in huge quantities. Those distributors then sell them to "small-batch users", and they're not involved with AMD/Xilinx free-tier software at all.

> they’re running at around -10% profit on small sales to try and drive subscription revenue multipliers

More baseless speculation

by altairprime1 hours ago|

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> More baseless speculation

Your elided quote removes the five words where I declared my views as speculation openly and in plain language. The complete sentence that you misquoted opens with that:

> I would hazard a guess

I’m perfectly content to be wrong at HN; it’s a forum where we all have opinions and people rarely restrict themselves to exclusively their own expert subjects, or else we’d all never learn anything! So I will be considering the arguments made here by others before engaging with this topic in the future.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256417 from a few days ago apparently makes some of my points much more clearly, or at least with less hostile replies. I wish I’d found it sooner, but I didn’t realize this entire post was a dupe in time to go back through its comments in detail. Would have saved me commenting at all! Ah well.