Submission + - AMD (Xilinx) changes FPGA dev tool licensing, excludes Linux in free tier
Sun writes: AMD has announced a change to the way they are licensing Vivado, their FPGA development tool. The spotlight of their announcement is the shift to yearly subscription instead of a one-time license.
Unsurprisingly, they are phrasing it as an improvement, saying "Annual subscriptions offer lower entry cost and continuous access to the latest updates."
Hidden between the lines of the announcement, however, is the change to the free of charge tier. AMD is adding more devices to be supported in this tier, which is supposedly the carrot. The stick, however, is the removal of certain debug features.
The thing that's likely to hit the hobbist community the worst, however, is that the free tier will now not be available on Linux.
AMD are saying that old licenses are still in effect, so it appears that if you hurry to install Vivado now, you'd still be able to use it moving forward. It is not clear, however, whether it'll still be possible to install Vivado 2025.2 after Vivado 2026.1 becomes available.
Unsurprisingly, they are phrasing it as an improvement, saying "Annual subscriptions offer lower entry cost and continuous access to the latest updates."
Hidden between the lines of the announcement, however, is the change to the free of charge tier. AMD is adding more devices to be supported in this tier, which is supposedly the carrot. The stick, however, is the removal of certain debug features.
The thing that's likely to hit the hobbist community the worst, however, is that the free tier will now not be available on Linux.
AMD are saying that old licenses are still in effect, so it appears that if you hurry to install Vivado now, you'd still be able to use it moving forward. It is not clear, however, whether it'll still be possible to install Vivado 2025.2 after Vivado 2026.1 becomes available.
