SUN and IBM PC....which one is the best for layout design?

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k1gunner

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Hi~~everyone..

I've used SUN ultra60 for analog layout design at my office.
However, I got a second job at home......

I've wanted to buy a Sun blade2000, but it's too expensive to get it (around $20000)
so I got a IC50 for Linux to use my IBM PC at my home. (P4 1.7Ghz, RDRAM 512MB, VideoRAM 64MB)
However, the performance at IBM PC was so terrible. The video display delay is too slow to work.
I don't know whice one is good, buying a used ULTRA80 or buying a NEW IBM PC(P4 3Ghz or XEON, 2GB ram,scsi...)
I think the prices is almost same(used ultar80 and New PC).
However, if I get a ultra80, I can't find layout program..... that's a problem...
Anyone use PC for layout? Is it good?
Thanks in adv...
 

I run nc-verilog on RedHat 8!!!
It is so fast!!!
My cpu--2.6G,RAM--2G,HD--120G
 

Hi,

Why not trying Laker if you are familiar with Cadence Virtuso ?
 

Re: SUN and IBM PC....which one is the best for layout desig

You should choose PC.
My friend designed a 10bit pipeline ADC on linux environment.
This chip has tape-outed last month.
He used laker for layout. Laker is a better layout tool than virtuso.
Laker has more friendly interface, faster display, and easier to layout.
At our office, we have ultra60 and blade1000, but he still prefer using
linux because linux box could gain more performace.

 

You should choose PC. Last month, I tape-out a memory design (including schematic entry,simulation,LVS,DRC)with my notebook. (P3-850,384Mb RAM). Everything is fine.
PS3-850 is 3times faster than Sun Blade 100 (500Mhz)
 

if your design is large,you should use SUN!!!
 

Re: SUN and IBM PC....which one is the best for layout desig

PS3-850 is 3times faster than Sun Blade 100 (500Mhz)
Click to expand...

What are you basing this on? Not on CPU clock speed(MHz) i hope, because the Sun processors are a very different & better architechture than x86 PC.
 

Re: SUN and IBM PC....which one is the best for layout desig

apart from the cpu speed, size of memory of the system is also importance since you are dealing with intense graphics.

a pc installed with linux with a memory of 1G is pretty fast too.
 

Actually, PC with linux environment is able to handle analog design.
Analog IC design is not as large as digital IC design which includes million gate counts.
So you dont spend a lot of money buying a low performace and expensive sun workstation.
 

Re: SUN and IBM PC....which one is the best for layout desig

If you are worried about the stable of your PC ,you can by HP Linux Workstation with the HP version of Linux ,it is optimized for Linux . It is more stable than common compatible PC.
 

Hello Guys! For digital design, several millions gates design is Ok for PC Linux. Unless your design need more than 3.5G memory in single process.
 

Who can tell me the price of an used Ultra80(ie. 2nd hand) in US$ ? What contents are this Ultra80 included ? e.g. CPU Type & Speed, Main Memory Size, Hard Disk Size, OS version, Monitor Type & Resolution, etc....
 

Re: SUN and IBM PC....which one is the best for layout desig


You can buy a SunBlade2000 if you are a millionair !
Buy Ultra5 or Ultra 10 . It costs around $200
Why do you need Ultra 80, it is a 4 CPU machine and very expensive ( around $2000)and genally its CPU speed is slow, unless you want to use it as a server.
 

Re: SUN and IBM PC....which one is the best for layout desig

For home use, it has to be a PC as no one i know is willing to spend $20k-30k of thier own money on a SUN workstation period. If your Company is willing to fork out then thats a different story even then I would recommend either a P4 machine with 4GB of Dual channel memory assuming your designs donot require more than 3.5GB of memory.

For a slightly higher cost a uni-processor Opteron would be ideal as you would have a max of 8GB of RAM and also 64-capability of which Cadence and Mentor have allready started to support because of the demand from the Linux/EDA community. The optimum choice would be a DUAL Operton system with 16GB max RAM capacity (8 slots x 1GB DIMMS, 8 slots x 2GB DIMMS)

Systems from BOXX have already been certified by SUN, I would recommend the BOXX R4.1 as a base system (4 x 512MB RAM minimum).

KLEOS
 

Re: SUN and IBM PC....which one is the best for layout desig

The xeon system although they have an impressive spec donot perform as well as they should for the money you pay. They have poor memory performance due to the shared FSB. Rumer has it that the Operon Line will support DDR400 giving 6.4Gb/sec in Uni-proccesor configs and 12.8Gb/sec in Dual-processor configs if iam not mistaken (could be the 4 Way systems??)

KLEOS
 

Re: SUN and IBM PC....which one is the best for layout desig

gezzas525 said:
For home use, it has to be a PC as no one i know is willing to spend $20k-30k of thier own money on a SUN workstation period.
KLEOS
Click to expand...

You don't need to spend $20-30K for a Sun machine. You can get a decent Ultra Sparc I 167Mhz as low as $50.0 on Ebay. With a decent one Ultra5 or Ultra 10 with 440Mhz , you can just spend less than $300.00
And this system use the same IDE hard drive and the same VGA monitor as PC. And remember this is a 64 bit machine.


gezzas525 said:
Systems from BOXX have already been certified by SUN, I would recommend the BOXX R4.1 as a base system (4 x 512MB RAM minimum).

KLEOS
Click to expand...

Please educate me. i really don't know what it is. can you point me its website. Have been play with Sun and Sun-clone for a long time , i never heard of this one.

I agree that the future of Sun machine is not bright after the advent of PC Linux box. The price of Sun box is five to ten times more expensive, the CPU speed is just 1/3 of Intel counterpart. But as I know know, the number of EDA support Linux is very limited. I don't know if is there any EDA software with 64 bit on Linux yet. And to tell the truth i can't trust the result on Linux platform. Let ask the folk at Intel, the very company who produce micropressor, what machine they use to design its chip?
Can anyone answer.

Conclusion: Spend around $500 to buy an Ultra Sparc 10 with 440MHZ, 120 GB hard drive, 1GB memory. If you still have some more money left buy a SCSI card so you can use it to connect a tape drive, big external RAID and anything you can think of.
 

Re: SUN and IBM PC....which one is the best for layout desig

Iam comparing a new SUN Machine such as the Blade 2000 hence the $20000 price tag, BOXX systems are certified by SUN as seen on thier website take a look yourself. As for speed differnce between a P4/Opteron and a SUN is rediculous for the sake of comparison a 2.4Ghz P4 (256MB) was around 3 times faster than a DUAL Blade 1000 (4GB) I'd wonder what kind of difference we would expext for a DUAL 2Ghz Opteron Machine fitted with 4GB of RAM VS a DUAL BLADE 2000. OK you would probably get better reliability with the SUN machine (this is debatable) but really for doing work at home do you wait 1 hour for a simulation or 2-3 minutes (iam not exagerating here)
 

Re: SUN and IBM PC....which one is the best for layout desig

HI,

I don't think cpu & mem speed is the main concern about two architectures ( SUN or X86), P4 2.0G with 1G MEM is enough for normal layout design and the cpu is fast enough, you can design millions gates layout use this pc.

I though your slow display problem is because you don't have a good Video Card Driver for linux, for me, I prefer Nvidia video card because it has linux driver , you can find it from Nvidia's website. it can make your display ten times faster than generic svga driver.
 

Re: SUN and IBM PC....which one is the best for layout desig

gezzas525 said:
BOXX systems are certified by SUN as seen on thier website take a look yourself.
Click to expand...
BOXX is a intel-based system.It wonder I don't know. Why it is certified by SUN? Where do you get that rediculous info?

It doesn't matter how fast, and how much memory the system. The bottom line is the EDA software it support. Remember layout tools support Unix platform almost two decades ago. The first Cadence IC5 for Linux just exist a year ago. And it has a lot of bug too. I wonder if you ever use IC5 or any EDA tools? Talking about reliability, how manytime you have to reboot your PC in a week? My cheap Sun Box is up almost a year now.
 

Re: SUN and IBM PC....which one is the best for layout desig

Sun to Release 64-BIT SOLARIS for Opteron.

https://news.com.com/2100-1006_3-5089274.html?tag=nefd_top

Well what do you think is gona come next?

Opteron had SUN certification and now plans to release Solaris for it.
All that is left is for Mentor/Cadence/Synopsis to release the software (2004-2005) theres a slide somewhere on the web.
 

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