alt Hacker NewsHardware 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.)
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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.
> Hardware isn’t where the margins are
Baseless speculation
> 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
More baseless speculation
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.