OMG. What did you think?

[mfro]

As there doesn't seem to be any dedicated feedback forum for forum issues anymore, I post here to express my complete dissatisfaction with the new 'solution':

Although the old Altera forums weren't especially fast and user friendly, the new one appears to me as huge quantum leap. Backwards.

It's awfully slow, apparently buggy (messages about Javascript blocking the browser everywhere), pages constantly displaying busy indicators.

Long story short: I consider it completely useless in it's current state. If you want to get rid of your trusty Altera customers, this is a perfect way to do so...

[corestar]

> 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/

[BRICH2]

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.

[HMede]

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?? 

[corestar]

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 ...

[MaryT_Intel]

Hello @corestar​ , We appreciate your feedback. We do have a link on the home page now for Website feedback or to report a problem: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/forms/corporate/webmaster-contact-us.html

We are consolidating all of Intel's communities onto a new platform and as you have noticed, we have some bumps to still work out. I apologize for the inconvenience. We have a team of developers making updates and we will continue to refine and make enhancements to the site.

Addressing the Search issues is taking time but a high priority so we've got that and a bunch of other enhancements coming. Thanks for alerting us to issues and for your patience as we try to smooth this out.

Kind regards,

Mary T.

Community Manager

[mfro]

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?

[jrrguzman]

As per today the forum is unusable. There is no other way to put it.

[DBay]

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.

[mfro]

@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 ...

[Tricky]

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.

[DBay]

I have been an Altera user for over 25 years. I used to agree 100% with your first paragraph. I haven't used Quartus since 14.1, since all my work has been on older(ie not Stratix V) chips that the new software doesn't support. This new 17/18 software has documentation that makes XIlinx look good. I NEVER thought I'd be saying this.

It used to be that Quartus was sooo much better than anything else I was spoiled. I hated the Xilinx tool set. VIvado still isn't great, but at least what it has doesn't crash. It's features may not always work well, but it doesn't crash. Their documentation is horrible from the tool set, but a google search will usually find the correct answer. Altera? I'm still trying to figure out how to get any documentation that is relevant to the page that you tried for help on.

I agree completely with your second paragraph.

I agree VIvado has less features, but it doesn't crash. 18 is almost on par now with Vivado since any advanced features either don't work anymore or they crash.

Sad....... ( yes, this reference is intentional.....)

[schendel_nsf]

I feel that Intel is doing itself a disservice by calling the two Suites Prime and Prime Pro.

In reality the Prime software is the "ISE" package for still supported but not improved "legacy" chips, whereas Prime Pro is the "Vivado" for newer chips, that is still updated.

As I would like to use the same VHDL code (blocks) on Cyclone IV and Arria10, I feel kind of left behind: I cannot update to VHDL2008, because it is not supported for the Cyclone IV.

The same thing goes for the C++ support on the Nios II SBT, which is stuck at gcc 5.3 (C++14), although, here I think you can use the Pro tools with the standard version (if that is allowed).

On topic: Still waiting for a way to see posts since last visit...