Long-time Slashdot reader [1]Sun writes:

> AMD has [2]announced a change to the way they are licensing Vivado, their FPGA development tool... Hidden between the lines of the announcement [of a new model starting with the 2026.1 release] 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.

"Almost all our surveys show... close to 70% of the customers are still using Windows," explained AMD senior product application engineer Anatoli Curran [3]on the tool's support forum . "Vivado ML Standard Edition v2025.2 is going to be officially supported (I mean if there are any bugs found, these can be fixed) until v2026.3 release... Any release older than the current 3 released versions of Vivado then becomes unsupported (meaning no bugs will be fixed with Vivado Standard Edition v2025.2 after Vivado v2026.3).

"However, users can continue using V2025.2 forever, if they wish to do so... Also, Vivado ML Standard Edition v2025.2 is license-free... Users only need to obtain and use any IP Core related licenses, or Vivado Model Composer (for SysGen)."



[1] https://www.slashdot.org/~Sun

[2] https://www.amd.com/en/products/software/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/vivado/vivado-licensing-options.html

[3] https://adaptivesupport.amd.com/s/question/0D5Pd00001YQLdMKAX/why-is-vivado-20261-dropping-linux-support-for-free-tier-?language=en_US