Editorial

Why Most Engineers Insist on Unix Unlike many managers, engineers generally oppose designing on Windows NT. Their reasons are ease of use and, more important, reliability. Is Linux a reasonable alternative? by Jonah McLeod

It's been my experience that engineers view the world differently from the management they work for. Managers, for example, are often driven primarily by financial constraints. To an engineer, the budget is typically one variable in a complex of parameters--performance, power consumption, reliability, and the like. The difference in views also appears in the engineer's choice of a computing platform for his desktop.

Mark Santoro, an engineer turned president and CEO of Micro Magic, Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., frequently comes up against this divergence. He says that company managers want to have Micro Magic's tools on a Pentium platform running under Windows NT, while their engineers who use the tools are adamant about keeping the tools on a workstation running under Unix.

We wanted to know if any major differences in the two platforms still existed, so we embarked on a series of three benchmarks in conjunction with Seva Technologies, Inc. of Fremont, Calif. The first, now done, would test Verilog simulation; the second, synthesis; and the third, placement and routing. The aim is to determine the performance of Pentium-based Windows NT systems running a typical ASIC and GDS II design flow.

Five different 300-MHz Pentium II desktop systems and one 300-MHz UltraSPARC II workstation from Sun Microsystems were tested in the first benchmark (see March, p. 62). (We expect more Pentium II machines in future tests.) The benchmark examined how the systems executed Cadence Design Systems' Verilog-XL on circuits ranging in size from 10,000 to over a million gates.

If you read our report, you'll know that the Pentium systems compared well with the Unix workstation in terms of price/performance. With the advent of 333-MHz Pentium-based systems, the scale may tip in favor of the Pentium-based platforms. Furthermore, we expect that the NT-based tools needed for a complete ASIC flow will be available this year, with back-end tools becoming available late in the year or early next year.

Optimism about an ASIC flow on a PC is buoyed by the recent announcement by Synopsys . The Mountain View, Calif.­based company boasted that by the end of this year, the majority of its design tools--presumably synthesis as well--would also run on Pentium-based Windows NT desktop systems.

All of this is happening while engineers in general still remain adamantly opposed to it. I was left to ponder what it was that engineers most dreaded about this transition. One thought was that they hated the idea of change. Consider how hesitant most designers were when Sun forced them to abandon SunOS in favor of Solaris. Another possibility was a general dislike of Microsoft and the Windows NT operating system.

However, readers have detailed specific technical reasons for their preference for Unix, and we've published some of their comments in the past few issues of the magazine in our Feedback column. One was ease of use (see December, p. 10; March, p. 12).

A far greater concern is NT's reliability. Readers complain of the poorer reliability of NT compared with Unix (we plan to print such comments in coming issues). In addition, the benchmark report noted a problem with hang-ups.

Reliability was an issue that came up in a conversation I had with James Lee, senior consulting engineer at Seva Technologies. He's the man who ran the benchmarks and the co-author of the report. We were throwing around the idea of testing Windows NT against another Unix operating system on the PC. I mentioned free BSD, a favorite of our Webmaster, Marcelo Meurer. Lee responded that engineers would be more likely to adopt Linux instead. Of all the Unix implementations for the PC, he said, Linux is by far the most bullet-proof and far more robust than NT.

You'd think that Intel--which has no great incentive to help Microsoft dominate the EDA market--would recognize the value of Linux on a PC and push it as the OS of choice for the Pentium platform. The solution would go a long way to satisfying engineers opposed to Windows NT while at the same time advancing Pentium machines for EDA.

Am I fighting windmills here, or is there a larger number of designers who would embrace Pentium systems running Linux than would embrace Windows NT on the same platform? Send me an e-mail (jonah@isdmag.com) and let me know what you think. I'll disclose the results of the straw poll in a future editorial.

To voice an opinion on this or any Integrated System Design article, please email your message to miker@isdmag.com.

integrated system design  April 1998