Time to Upgrade ?:-}

Other possibly than the memory size, what makes you think you need to upgrade? The main reason why I feel I need a fast computer is because the browsers keep sucking more and more MHz. Otherwise the software I use all runs just fine on older machines.

--

Rick

I have a very nice 16-core Opteron machine that I'm very happy with. Apart from needing the PSU replaced a year or so back, it's been running flawlessly for about 4-1/2 years, and it has a lot of stooch (150 Gflops peak). The details are:

Supermicro tower server with 2 AMD Opteron Magny-Cours 8-core processors, 32 GB of RAM, 4x 1 TB HDDs CentOS 6.4 Linux, with Win 7 Pro 64 bit and Win XP 32-bit in KVM virtual machines

1 pc ACC-3C0-3C13685 Supermicro Chassis 733TQ 1 pc ACC-3C0-3C13685 SUPERMICRO H8DGI OR H8DGI-F 1 pc Adaptec 6405 RAID controller board 1 pc XFX ATI Radeon HD6670 1 GB DDR3 VGA/DVI/HDMI PCI-Express Video Card HD667XZHF3 2 pcs CFN-OTH-AC170 2 OPTERON COOLING FAN 2 pcs AMD OPTERON 6128 8-CORE 16 TOTAL CORES 8 pcs MM3-KIN-4G133ER KINGSTON 4GB DDR3 ECC REGISTERED CL9 1.35-1.5V (32gb of ram installed) 4 pcs HDA-WDC-WD1002F WDC RE4 1TB CDW-LGE-22XSATA 1 pc GOLDSTAR DVDRW 22X GH22NS30

Since AMD has kind of stumbled since Magny Cours (Bulldozer and Piledriver were dogs), you might want to use Intel instead, but the Supermicro systems are tops.

The whole thing was about $3800 from a highish-class reseller, Alvio, whom I've dealt with a few times and like very well. (Tell Aleksandr I said 'Hi.")

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

[snip]

Living in seclusion ;-) for quite awhile... what's the best Intel processor for number crunching? ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142     Skype: skypeanalog  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

A lot of that depends on how you work. I have friends who are perpetually upgrading -- trying to eek out the last epsilon of performance, never considering the time spent in the upgrade process (reinstallling software and then reconfiguring it for the various "options"/preferences you had); nor the "losses" that come with it (e.g., peripherals and applications that no longer work).

But, if you look at their work process, they sit and *watch* their machine, waiting for it to cough up a result. So, in their minds, every increase in performance (if not counteracted by inefficiencies in software "upgrades") is a net improvement.

OTOH, I prefer to wait a bit for each action I expect from my machines. This gives me time to reorganize my thoughts: what will I do *when* the machine is finished? what is my next priority? how will I verify that the machine has done what I expected of it? etc.

Likewise, if the time involved is "more than a cup of tea", I can move to another machine (or chore) and make some progress there. No need to sit and wait for a machine to do the job it *will* perform.

So, the trick is finding the right amount of "wait" -- too little and you can't get started on something else; too much and you risk the task taking too long for your schedule, etc.

In the 80's, I had a pair of 25MHz 386's. It would take a full 24 hours to render some of my 3D CAD models. I'd turn off the monitor (save power) and put a note on the keyboard: "Do not turn off" (lest I forget in a moment of distraction). Then, move to the other machine and keep working on mode models, or a schematic, or a layout, or some software, or assembling a prototype, or ordering components, or office supplies, etc. Always *something* that could be done in the time waiting (without it feeling like you're "waiting")

Dunno, I haven't needed to buy . Beautiful Layout Hunchback has a Core i7 quad machine (Win 7) that she likes, also purchased from Alvio. Given that it's your daily tool, I suggest finding a good VAR and taking their advice. It'll cost a bit more, but you're likely to be happy with the results.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Anything would be an upgrade. What is your budget? (willing to spend)

The Dell Workstations are pretty good with their number crunching Xeons. But even the little NUC's will be faster than what you have. You'll have to give up the floppy, and get a Lacie usb Floppy ;)

Cheers

Floppy is not an issue... I long ago copied all my 5.25" and 3.5" stuff onto CD's fearing those drives would fail sooner or later.

What does multi-core buy you? And how many are worthwhile? ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142     Skype: skypeanalog  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

And 64-bit versus 32-bit? ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142     Skype: skypeanalog  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Which Spice are you running and can it support more than one core (thread)?

Like LTSpice supports multiple threads. It greatly speeds things up on large designs.

How many? how deep are your pockets ;)

At least 4, most Intels are 4 cores. The I7's are fast at 3.0GHz. But the Xeons are designed to crunch numbers and are perfered for CAD work.

Look at the dell 7810, with a Xeon E5-2623 it's just shy of $2K

Their onsite service is great, we have 4 5 year old 3500's at work and one was reparied nextday without a hitch. Be sure to use the business side of dell.

Cheers

[snip]

PSpice mostly, single thread, but I use LTspice on occasion to help clients.

I'll probably buy two machines. Medium pockets ;-)

...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142     Skype: skypeanalog  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

I have a Dell XPS I7 8 core with 12G and 2T Hd, 24" wide screen.. W7-64 I zips along very nicely I might add.

Jamie

Xeon. After them i7. But verify if the sw you're using is OpenCL compliant, if yes, then go get a good video card, because the sw can use the GPU for number crunching.

Bye Jack

--
Yoda of Borg am I! Assimilated shall you be! Futile resistance is, hmm?

Some more RAM. Figure on 8 GB to start. CPUs for the new OS (Windows 10?) are Intel i5 and i7, and various Athlon II/Phenom II which have multiple cores. Probably four is plenty, and high-end (Xeon) not required. If your disk usage stays modest, a 240 GB SSD will suit you for some years to come. Instead of a combo drive, DVD-rw.

Consider the advantages to multiple monitors, while you're at it; many engineers find it useful to keep two or three screens over the desk. Fullsize case for adding full-height cards is recommended.

Expect that newly compiled software will use the extra cores (and RAM etc.) in coming years; you'll notice some speedups immediately, but more as the years pass.

you want the Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3 @ 2.30GHz w/ 128GB 0.5CLK DDR5 Quad-Channel RAM for sure

and a bunch of SATA-4 drives to boot from

and that OS the Cray folks run these days...

Win7 is still preferable though leave it another year or so and Win 10 may have bedded down. Avoid Win8 unless you like pain.

A slightly devious approach is to look at machines favoured by the local

3D gaming community and persuade the supplier to build you one *without* the high performance graphics card. i7 2D graphics are as fast as dedicated cards. Unless you want 3D gaming you can live without. There is a big power saving to be had there too.

A good heuristic is to choose a CPU that is just behind the bleeding edge and offers the best or nearly the best bang per buck for the sorts of thing you are doing. You can't have enough ram for simulations.

It depends a bit on your local market. If I was buying today price no object then maybe i7-5930K but realistically i7 4790K. I have an aversion to AMD due to self immolation but two are better than it.

Check local reviews for reliability and build quality. Clocked normally the thing will be fast and don't waste your money on super fast ram like I did improvement is marginal. A fast agile SSD for scratch files and most frequently used programs is very worthwhile.

Not convinced by the Intel smart SSD cache of a big disk. Mine died permanently after about two years flawless operation. I live without it since major work files live on the Samsung SSD (consider also Crucial).

(on the plus side no data was lost when it pegged out)

Beware of makers that game the benchmarks!

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown

[snip]

Just anticipating _very_ aged equipment croaking at an inopportune moment. ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142     Skype: skypeanalog  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Is there even *any* SPICE that's GPU-enabled, yet?

LTSpice is SMP, which is, sad to say: decades ahead of the curve. Considering everyone else is stuck in 1981, or whenever it was XSPICE was released. NI/Multisim, Altium, PSpice(?), take your pick... (NgSpice?) They're all based on that one (free, coincidentally!) SPICE core.

Short of it is, more than two CPU cores (or a fancy GPU, beyond good 2D and good enough 3D performance) doesn't buy you much in EDA these days.

Kind of a bizarre inversion, historically speaking: EDA and CAD used to be the prime driver behind top-of-the-line workstations. 'Course, they cost $100k back then, too. It's been my experience that the mid-level software companies (~$10k/license and down) have been strangely resistant to any kind of advancement or refinement of this sort.

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC 
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Contract Design 
Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com

I've always maintained a hot spare of every system I've used. If something crashes, I can be up and running on another machine within a matter of hours -- or less.

Hardware is cheap. And, if you work like I do (move on to something else instead of waiting for a machine to finish), the "spare" just facilitates that.

I got a new PC on Friday, and I'm going through the awful process of installing all my existing apps and settings and projects and desktop stuff. Old HP XP, new monster Win7 Dell with 4x the ram, 30x the disk, gobs of horsepower. Such a trauma is worth it every 3 years or so, certainly not much more often.

I occasionally run a Spice sim on the old 5-year-old HP that take many minutes per run, so design iterations are slow. That's about the slowest thing I do, and most circuit sims take a second or two. I can spin a SolidWorks 3D model essentially instantly. Doing a design rules check on a big PC board might take 10 seconds, so I don't often need more compute power. Webbing is connection speed limited.

Why does Microsoft keep changing the way Windows works, for no apparent reason? Most annoying.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
lunatic fringe electronics 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com