How to organize the PCs/ Workstations?

[cmosbjt]

We have a IC design team and we have a budget to buy either 2 workstations or some PCs. We will install IC EDAs such as @DS/Cadence in these machines. If we buy PC, then we install Linux and using floating license.

My question is, what should we buy, PCs or Workstation? What kind of configuration should I use?

Thanks.

Added after 5 hours 5 minutes:

We want to put all the design files in one server so that any designer in our group can access. Can PC do this job?

If we buy workstation, the drawbacks are:
1. we only have money enough for two, other than that we still need to pay the cost of Unix (2 set).
2. The CPU power seems to be not very strong when many designers use the EDA software (telnet) at the same time.

 

[Teddy]

PC seems faster because of the CPU clock but i did not enjoy good multitasking.
SUN- is ok cheap WS
I prefer HP - you can buy HP800 on E-bay for a very decent price (<1k) Those are refurbished machines. (do not buy it from E-bay though. Contact seller directly and try to negiciate the price by comparing several sellers against each other)
If you have more people working on on machine I bet WS will be better.
It also depends how serous you are baout designing. If it is school - PC will be ok.
SUN - free stuf available, easier to play with, more support by most of the vendors. Les power than HP in my opinion.

 

[cmosbjt]

It is a company's project. Since the project is not confirmed and the budget is limited, we want to reduce the risk at the very begining.

What is the average price of SUN WS? Thanks

 

[rfsystem]

An Athlon64/Opteron 2.4GHz based Linux outperform the 1GHz Sun by a factor of about 2. As a complete workstation it is already cheaper. We do not buy any further Sun Sparc based machines. The issue is that the new PC hardware is only supported by newer Linux distributions. These are not fully compatible with IC5032 or IC5033. The newer IC could solve that. But it depend on the silicon vendor which IC version should be used. The biggest chance is to use NForce hardware because NVidea support also Redhad7.2/7.3.

 

[andy2000a]

many small design house use linux EDA ..

as I know

(a) CPU & RAM
1. use K8 is fast than P4
2. if you want many people share 1 server
like > 2 people use hspice in X86 ,
Opteron is good CPU than Xeon --> tech report
but opteron need use ECCDRAM --> very expensive
1G ECCDRAM -> U$400 , but DDR1 1G only $200 ..
3. at least 1G DRAM for simulation .. and use good 2D graphic for display
large simulation waveform (if you over ethernet you need 100M bits ethernet)
don't need 3D VGA

for P&R , I think you need much more memory

(b) HD
1. SCSI is fast .. but some Motherboard & linux need setup SCSI card IRQ
2. you need Raid system for backup .. but I find some IDE raid only
have windows driver
3. don't use Serial-ATA .. linux lack of driver , becuase EDA usually old version linux

(3) OS
redhat 7.2 is better , or redhat8 ..
other linux FC or susie .. you will meet some problem for setup cadence tool


finally .... don't setup illeage linux EDA and saving money for your company ..
because your boss don't give you much more money ,

but if your company use illeage tools , and be find by Cadence ..
your boss will said "this is personal and do by engineer, not company"

another problem is , MIS don't deal with this EDA server .. you must handle it
but you "never nevry..." get much more money from your company

 

[alanbrooke]

In my company, we have a lot of strong server, we use a software named "exceed" to connect to the main server. We used the PC just like use the work station. It's very convenient.