General Vivado question

[a2retro]

Until now I have always used the free ISE Webpack. One of the reasons i picked up the Arty was to finally try some of the advanced tools available in the design suite. While i understand the design suite is node and chip locked I was hoping I could dump my installs of ISE 13 and 14 and just use Vivado from now on, knowing the extra toolset would only work on the Artix 7 but all the other base tools should work ok?.

Is this advisable or should i limit my use of Vivado to Artix7 only and keep using ISE 14 for all my other projects?

Glenn

[hamster]

I keep ISE around for working on Spartan 3 or Spartan 6 based projects - those FPGAs are not supported as targets for Vivado.

[jamey.hicks]

I find Vivado to be so much better than ISE that I won't work with any devices it does not support. Before Arty, there was a pretty big price gap between Spartan boards and Artix boards, but now I would say use Vivado as much as possible.

Licensing-wise, I think Vivado and ISE are comparable. Vivado webpack will work with Zedboard and Zybo, and typically other Xilinx boards come with device-locked licenses for those boards.