I imagine it's due to having had decent enough GPUs and decent enough CPUs, from a single vendor.
If you want the platform to be x86 but not AMD then your only other choice is Intel, but they've only recently started making high performance GPUs. So then you need another vendor for the GPU, and your only choice is Nvidia.
A lot simpler, cheaper and predictable to go with a single vendor for both I imagine?
Pretty sure this 'article' was written by an LLM, having scraped the HN discussion on here from 4 days ago. Nothing new there apart from a clickbait title and a ton of ads.
Folks feel outrage when companies start charging for things that were once free.
Okay, but what if you run a company whose business model no longer supports giving away free stuff? How can you transition? What would users consider less outrageous?
I mean perhaps the silver lining is the projects I use are all stuck on 2022.1 for now. I wonder if this is because they want to gate usage by AI agents.
NVIDIA ended support for their 10xx series [1]. To be clear, AMD also moved support for their equivalent 5xxx series to legacy drivers [2], but "supports their cards for many years" doesn't hold value if both companies stopped their respective GPUs at basically the same time.
Also remember that one of those 2 companies has opensource drivers for Linux for their old GPUs, while the other doesn't (newer NVIDIA GPUs have an opensource driver but this isn't the case for the 10xx series). Users of legacy NVIDIA cards needs on Linux needs to use their old driver branches, with results that are less than optimal to say the least.
Your "true observation" doesn't contribute to the context of this particular topic thread which "has nothing to do with [your] comment", as you are "well aware". You should review the HN Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When AMD bought Xilinx I was hoping they'd open up the software side like they (eventually) did with their GPU drivers. Looks like that isn't happening anytime soon.
It seems silly to put up SW barriers for people to use your fairly expensive HW, but what do I know.
There's no free alternatives, because AMD doesn't document the bitstream format (i.e. what you need to push to the FPGA to program it to do wha you want).
This software seems to never have been open source/freely licensed. That's not a bait and switch. They were giving you a commercial product, for free, and now have decided not to.
It's likely a case where maintaining separate builds for the free and commercial tiers was getting complex. Often times, this kind of software requires lots of manual reviewing and adding or removing modules, and they probably decided it's just not worth it.
I don't see how that particular line of thinking applies when:
1) They continue to have a free version for Windows
2) They continue to have a version for Linux
I just can't see that cost of having a free Linux version (on top having a paid Linux version) is big?
"AMD never misses a chance to miss a chance."
In this case, the chance to trash its reputation with customers.
If you want the platform to be x86 but not AMD then your only other choice is Intel, but they've only recently started making high performance GPUs. So then you need another vendor for the GPU, and your only choice is Nvidia.
A lot simpler, cheaper and predictable to go with a single vendor for both I imagine?
Link to my comment, so that I don't repeat myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256417
Okay, but what if you run a company whose business model no longer supports giving away free stuff? How can you transition? What would users consider less outrageous?
I wonder how many Linux GPU sales their decision to penalize Linux on their FPGA line will cost them.
Not many I would guess.
Quote: 'The only source I can give at this time is "trust me bro"'
Don't upgrade. It's just that simple.
Do they offer some unique features in the new version or is it a habit to upgrade everything every day?
This is an absolute foot-gun moment. And the gaslighting PR responses are just unacceptable. I'm very disappointed in them.
AMD just does not see the world this way.
Also remember that one of those 2 companies has opensource drivers for Linux for their old GPUs, while the other doesn't (newer NVIDIA GPUs have an opensource driver but this isn't the case for the 10xx series). Users of legacy NVIDIA cards needs on Linux needs to use their old driver branches, with results that are less than optimal to say the least.
[1]: https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-officially-ends-geforce-g...
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/amd-says-that-its-no...
A lot of the serious CUDA compute stuff is also not supported on all platforms (it's linux only, because why would you do such stuff on windows).
It seems silly to put up SW barriers for people to use your fairly expensive HW, but what do I know.
Also this site (itsfoss.com) is unusable and riddled with hundreds of ads and sets my machines fans to full blast.
At least use another credible source or go to the source instead as per the HN guidelines.
It's likely a case where maintaining separate builds for the free and commercial tiers was getting complex. Often times, this kind of software requires lots of manual reviewing and adding or removing modules, and they probably decided it's just not worth it.
I just can't see that cost of having a free Linux version (on top having a paid Linux version) is big?