OMG. What did you think?

Ok, so nearly two weeks in - and it feels like the forum has died!

On the old forum, there would be many new posts every day. Since the switch, it feels like a busy day if theres 1 or two new posts.

> Ok, so nearly two weeks in - and it feels like the forum has died!

Hmm. Objective achieved?

> Ok, so nearly two weeks in - and it feels like the forum has died!

It didn't die, it was murdered ! More importantly, it feels like Altera has died! Looking at their news, data centers are all they blather on about. It's pretty clear if you're not designing an AI system that uses a $4,000 Stratix 10, Intel has no interest in your business. The revenue from lower end chips probably is not worth the time of $60B Intel as it was for $1.7B Altera.

https://newsroom.intel.com/category/programmable-solutions-group/

It's working for me. I had trouble finding the FPGA area, but now that i have, my browser is working fine. I'm still getting used to navigating by topic, and would like to see a forum and sub-forum 'tree' to navigate up and down through topics.

It is really one big mess!! I just send my opinion to the web "masters' of Intel. Useless forum now. Completely unstructured, search not working without blowing up my firefox browser. Main issue is that I need to browse manually through 30000 messages without any structure. Every response is hidden with a 'read more' button. Dramatic! Would this really be the final point in time to switch over to another FPGA vendor??

It would be really helpful if Intel would make a statement that they did not intentionally destroy Altera for anything but high-end Stratix 10 chips and they plan to correct it. Their silence is probably our answer.

We've been looking at abandoning Altera (I notice the Intel spell checker does not think Altera is a word :-) ). The problem is all the other vendors have their own issues. We looked at switching to Xilinx since the Altera SoC tools are unusable crap, but then Xilinx Vivado is garbage (although the non-project mode looks promising). What a mess ...

Two and a half months have passed since I first posted this.

Search still hangs my browser (and many other's, I suppose).

Any hope to get this fixed?

Well at least the forum matches their software and documentation. They are all equally unusable and buggy!

I never thought that other vendor tool sets would look polished compared to Quartus. Never say never I guess.

This is what you get when a big corporation buys a smaller company for technology. They spit the useless remains out after fully digestion the once good(by comparison) company. This is just the first step of getting rid of all the customers.

@DBay​

Hmm. Would agree to this partly at most.

I understand you are quite frustrated because you appear having hit a particular bug in a pretty special tool usage scenario. And I completely understand that (went through similar experiences several times already).

Nevertheless, after some trips through other vendor's domains, IMHO Intel/Altera still does comparably good regarding products, tools and documentation (even *much* better in some areas - never thought before I would ever write *that*).

Now, if they'd just be able to tackle rather simple challenges like - e.g. - a reasonably well designed support forum ...

I also agree with @mfro​

Altera has always had better documentation compared to Xilinx for comparable products IMO. Altera has been better at providing usage examples and waveforms, whereas Xilinx often just supply a little text and expect you to understand how something works (then you often need to contact support to find the real answers!).

Im not an Altera user now, but with the way support has been going, apart from trying to align support across intel, the plan does appear to be similar to Xilinx: No support requests for low $ users, support engineers in the forum and fewer FAEs.

Vivado is still a terrible buggy mess (especially with VHDL) with very limited feature support compared to Prime Pro.