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

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.

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

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

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.

> 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.

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

On the other hand - this is now an opportunity for Linux community to show that they are actually able to fund development of software for their platform, right?

Many HNers promised to pay if developers bring their software to Linux - will that actually happen?

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