is there any hope for someone to become a professional in the field without an electronic/computer engineering degree? I'd love to do stuff that I can actually hold in my hand (did some reverse engineering for a usb sound card and it felt rewarding cause I could quite literally hear the success), but I only have a computer science adjacent degree (BBa in Business Information Technology).
You can learn enough CAD to design your first thing in a day, enough about electronics to design your first thing in a week. A 3D printer and an order to jlcpcb.com will get you started. There are a very large number of avenues to go down but those are a couple.
Given how many idiotic ideas are ‘patched’ or worked around in software, it’s probably pretty easy. Especially in the world of modern GPUs when only a handful of people at the factory are able to write drivers for it.
Hardware vendors lost the plot in the Winmodem era.
Winmodems are a very sensible idea. You know software-defined radio? They are that, but for modems. Expandable to support any current or future protocol, at the cost of CPU time. Why do we like SDRs but hate SDMs? That's an irrational position.
The actual problem with winmodems was them breaking the established software/hardware boundary, and the Linux community not having the resources to follow suit.
Nothing stops someone from taking the free Windows Vivado and making it run on Linux, or taking a Winmodem driver and making it run on Linux, or writing a from-scratch software implementation of a 56k modem that can run on any sound card plugged into a phone line (which is what a Winmodem is), or reverse engineering the bitstream format for these FPGAs and writing a compiler from scratch (or even just the device-dependent backend - the frontend and middle-end can be developed in a more normal way and can be shared with other toolchains). But nobody actually stepped up and did it, which I think is proof that the free software community is a lot weaker than it thinks it is.
You could even do it right now, if you wanted to. You're not, and I'm sure there are good reasons for that. Extrapolate it across all developers, and it's unfortunate that it seems none of them have enough reason to do it. On the flip side, if anyone reading this does suddenly decide they have enough reason to do it... (Incentive: FPGAs are fun to play with!)
It's a practical position. The era of Winmodems was a long time ago, and the hardware was terrible compared to what we have now. Today, SDR is a fun thing anybody can pick up as a hobby. If it doesn't work, I have three other ways of accessing the Internet. If your winmodem didn't work, you didn't have a smartphone or a tablet to connect to ChatGPT (well, Altavista at the time) with and look for help. Then, when they did work, they were really bad because the single core CPUs of the day didn't have multiple cores to have the CPU cycles to run the software end of the modem and do anything else at the time. Which meant if you were running a game (Tuxracer, perhaps? Linmodem support wasn't broad, but it existed) at the same time, you lost. That tends to cause people to not like the product.
> Nothing stops someone from taking the free Windows Vivado and making it run on Linux
The EULA and the fact that the linux versior runs faster & has fewer bugs.
> just the device-dependent backend would be a major improvement and the frontend and optimizer could be shared with other toolchains
That's yosys and it's used by smaller commercial vendors.
> or reverse engineering then bitstream format for these FPGAs
Getting the timing is the hard part (+ good routing afterwards). The bitstream format has AFAIK mostly been reversed. 7 series has mediocre support , but US, US+ and Versal doesn't (probably because they're too expensive for personal usage).
You can just ignore the EULA. Nobody is coming to get you.
Sounds like yosys is good. Why is nobody using it? Why are we all hoping for Vivado instead of just using Yosys?
You can extract the timing information from Vivado. Such information is not copyrightable. You should be able to extract timing data and connectivity data from anything supported by the free version. You could also collaborate with someone with a really fast oscilloscope to gather some timing yourself, though that'll be extremely tedious.
Even if you just get the connectivity data and bitstream format and no timing, that's massively useful for less-than-high-speed projects. A single open source developer just has to make a contribution, doesn't have to do the whole thing in one go. The reverse engineering parts are often the most valuable, especially if they require access to hardware.
> You can just ignore the EULA. Nobody is coming to get you.
You can, but it's not gonna gain broad attention.
> Why is nobody using it?
It's used for chips with a good open source backend (lattice, gatemate). But it's non-trivial to integrate with the vivado backend and doesn't bring many benefits when used as such.
> You can extract the timing information from Vivado. Such information is not copyrightable.
Yes
> You could also collaborate with someone with a really fast oscilloscope to gather some timing yourself
No. Especially not fast-fast and slow-slow corners.
> Even if you just get the connectivity data and bitstream format and no timing, that's massively useful for less-than-high-speed projects.
Not really, you need at least a rough worst-case estimate. Otherwise even trivial designs might not work.
> A single open source developer just has to make a contribution, doesn't have to do the whole thing in one go.
A large part (clocks, routing, LUTs, BRAM, IO, a basic timing model) has to work, otherwise it's not really usable.
It's really non-trivial to get to a basic usable point. I would estimate at least 4-5 very experienced people working on this 2-3 years. Nothing impossible, but also not something that easily happens.
> > You can just ignore the EULA. Nobody is coming to get you.
> You can, but it's not gonna gain broad attention.
True I guess nobody ever gave a shit about The Pirate Bay. That project died without gathering a single user.
> > Why is nobody using it?
> It's used for chips with a good open source backend (lattice, gatemate). But it's non-trivial to integrate with the vivado backend and doesn't bring many benefits when used as such.
Sounds like someone should reverse engineer the vivado backend so it's not needed any more.
> The actual problem with winmodems was them breaking the established software/hardware boundary, and the Linux community not having the resources to follow suit.
I think you misspelled "winmodems were completely proprietary and prevented Linux community from writing their own drivers for the hardware".
Winmodems were the beginning of the era of "you cannot be allowed to use the hardware".
(As a technical solution, SDR makes perfect sense. The obstacle isn't technical.)
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?
AMD also had the strongest offering for GPU and CPU using the same memory with the same address space. That allows you to switch between CPU and GPU processing for the same data, without paying the cost of moving the data to and from the GPU. Similar to what we now have on Apple silicon
They tried to push the same into the desktop market with their APUs, where it was mostly ignored. But console games only target a couple hardware configurations, making it viable to take advantage of such hardware features
Also also, AMD’s play has always been to produce HW that offers good performance/$, with the downside of having much weaker SW offerings to go with it.
Consoles are always pressured to minimize upfront purchase costs, and they generally replace the vendor-provider SW stack with their own anyways.
And they’ve been in a rough spot at various times in the past, which probably made them willing to negotiate with the console companies.
Actually looking at this thread, there’s a lot of good reasons they were the go-tos for consoles. Consoles seem to be in rough shape at the moment, I wonder if part of that is that AMD has been doing too well since Zen, haha.
You’re approaching this as if every company had the same corporate intentions.
Nvidia never cared much for those types of deals. They preferred to lose Apple as a business than to admit fault, they’ve always refused to compete on price for the business of Sony and Microsoft’s consoles. They’re adamant to beat at the sound of their own drum.
Non-paying users aren’t customers, though, so they must view all this outrage seems irrelevant. Which suggests that they view free-tier Linux users as significantly less likely to ever pay for its use. That matches my understanding of the (non-Steam) Linux as a miserly and demanding target market, so I don’t really fault them for the choice — especially given how brutally expensive it is to support the IDIC of Miscellaneous Linuxes. Kind of surprised they haven’t just withdrawn free support for anything but Steam Linux, in order to lower their costs (and to produce a ‘free’ build that anyone can run privately but doesn’t interop at all with enterprise). Maybe they want it to be a ‘shareware trial’ for enterprise? Or perhaps they just haven’t thought of it yet.
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.
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.)
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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
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://hackernews.hn/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.
"AMD never misses a chance to miss a chance."
In this case, the chance to trash its reputation with customers.