Vivado on ARM Linux

[palmenros]

ARM is growing and eating a lot into x86 market share. From high performance servers to high efficiency and high performance laptops to Raspberry Pis. With the rise of ARM consumer computers (which will become more prevalent in the future) I think being able to install and run Vivado on them is very important.

Another important demographic to address are Mac Users. Before the Apple M1, which is ARM based, users could simply use Bootcamp or x86 accelerated virtual machines to install Vivado, with little performance cost. Macs are really popular among developers and its ARM market share is growing quickly. With the new chip, the bootcamp option is rendered impossible, and x86 virtual machines are unbearingly slow, as hardware accelerated emulation works much better with ARM.

I know MacOs is not a priority, and launching a Vivado version for MacOS would take a lot of resources. However, Linux on ARM has successfully been installed on Apple M1 devices.

For that reason I believe that having Vivado on Linux ARM as an option would be great, for Mac Users, Raspberry Pi Users, ARM servers users, etc.   

[anatoli]

Hello @palmenros ,

Thanks for your feedback, we really appreciate this.

This has been forwarded to our tools development team for evaluation.

We will keep you updated with any feedback received from the dev team.

Thanks once again and have a great day.

[soma_yow]

I was thinking exactly the same thing as @palmenros. My team will be moving to ARM64 Macs this year and it would be nice to be able to run Vivado locally in a VM. 

[soma_yow]

Also, FWIW I think Xilinx may be under estimating the demand from Mac users as they are all quietly using using VMs.

[anatoli]

Hello @palmenros ,

I've checked with the dev team and they have indicated that there currently no plans for this implementation, as this will take a rewrite of Vivado core algorithms that is not scheduled right now.
However, this is on their agenda for discussion and decision for the future implementation with our tools.

[soma_yow]

Thanks for checking up on this one @anatoli. 

Perhaps your dev team is not aware, but supporting the Mac when you are using the Qt toolkit does not require much effort, it is just a new build target. Sure there will be some wrinkles/hiccups, but it is a intern level project over a few months, not a core algorithm re-write.