New Contributor
Occasional ContributorHi, so welcome back in the past... When we started to develop FPGA 20years ago, the design tools were not free of charge as well (the early Max+PlusII times)... Meanwhile ALTERA decided to earn money by selling chips, not pieces of software. Maybe this change in philosophy by intel (to remove features from the lite edition) is the first step to eliminate the FPGAs from their line of devices despite eventually the high-priced ones used to accelerate intel's processors.
For me, it's quite useless to have Cyclone10 and MAX10 devices, targeting price sensitive mass-market applications if users are required to spend 3k$ for the toolset to use these chips. (Don't know whether free tools will be dropped by XILINX and all the others as well..)
I'm really sorry to see intel starting to drop long time ALTERA history and philosophy - something collegues argued already when intel aquired ALTERA :-|
But - just my two cents... (from a long time ALTERA user point of view).
New ContributorYes, I really can see no other reason for this move than to eventually discontinue the Lite product altogether, and then (as you say), entry-level devices can hardly be considered an important market. It's probably time for open source hardware projects and hobby & education to pull out now and move to other vendors than Intel. Too bad.
