Quoting boblq <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
400 cpus or even 10 times that seems like a drop in the bucket when compared with consumer markets for millions of units. Does EDA really matter to Intel? Why?
It does.. at least in that we're still actually pretty small compute size wise and will only keep growing. Other companies that have similar mass compute farms that already dwarf ours are places like ATI, Nvidia, Lucas arts, Dreamworks, etc.. It turns out that EDA and computer animation are _very_ similar in compute needs (lots of jobs that aren't parallelizable, using a grid-like system to dispatch jobs to systems). While the end result and tools are very different, they use computers a lot like we do. Attended a talk at LW a couple weeks ago where a guy from Dreamworks talked, and it was like hearing one of us talk about supporting chip designers. I don't mean to suggest that we're a _huge_ share of their market, but we are enough that it should be on their radar. Not to mention Intel has to do a lot of EDA work themselves. For awhile there, Itanium was going to be the future platform for EDA compute work.. that didn't last for long. Too expensive and being passed in speed by the x86_64 line. Oh, and Intel does see EDA as somewhat of an important market.. you should hear them pushing their idea of remote computing work in EDA on laptops. Talk of licensing the products in a way that you can checkout a license, then disconnect from the net and work remotely, then check it back in later. Intel loves it, because the laptops would be upgraded pretty regularly to keep up with speed I'm sure. Some of the ISVs love it, because it would guarantee more licenses to them, since people would have licenses out for long periods when they're not in use, whereas now they're only checked out as a tool runs. We don't like the idea ourselves for various reasons.. data sync would be a huge problem, tools having to be installed on every host vs our usage of AFS, cost of licenses.. laptops that are stolen with that much more company IP on it.. or just laptops damaged after the engineer did a ton of work, etc.. -- Mike Marion-Unix SysAdmin/Staff Engineer-http://www.miguelito.org Marge: "Homer, sitting that close to the TV can't be good for you." Homer: "Talking while the TV's on can't be good for you!" ==> Simpsons -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
