Four letters were of the I Don't See What You're Talking About variety. "At my previous employer we had many Sun Ultra-30, Ultra-60 and E-450 machines for doing ASIC design. We never had any trouble like [what] is being described. They would stay up for hundreds of days doing ASIC simulation and synthesis," wrote Tom Loftus of Intrinsix. "At my current job we continue to use dual-CPU Ultra-60s and Ultra-80s with 2- to 4-Gbyte memory without any trouble."

Seven letters detailed Sun workstation bugs or gripes. "At my last company we bought an E4500 with eight CPUs. During the first three months, we had seven CPU replacements (involving three slots on two trays) due to cache parity errors. The fix was to replace the trays, not the CPUs," wrote Ray Livingston of Creative Labs. "Sun was, however, always responsive, and never asked us to keep it quiet."

Three letters came from Sun employees, with the most interesting being this one: "John, I'll loan you a Sun workstation, you try to break it (with EDA SW exercises, not a ball peen hammer)," wrote Dennis Kelly of Sun. "Put it side by side to an Intel box, or your favorite HP-UX box, and report the results back in four months."

Workstation offer aside, what caught my eye were the five Linux letters.

"I've been using VCS, Finsim and Signalscan under Linux for a few years. Lately I've also been using Cadence Verilog XL under Linux. I have to say that I'm very happy with the performance of these tools under Linux," wrote one anon user. "I can also buy ten 1-GHz Athlon systems for the price of a single SunBlade."

"Chris Malachowsky's presentation at SNUG this week indicates that what Sun does may be irrelevant," wrote Ross Smith of Theseus Logic. "The number of Suns in their compute farm has remained constant over the past few years, while the number of Linux-based PCs has grown exponentially."

I called Chris and got a copy of his slides. Sure enough, 20 months ago Nvidia had 10 Linux boxes, 150 Suns and 100 NT boxes. Last month, Nvidia had 640 Linux boxes, 270 Suns and only 70 NT boxes. "We get 2- to 3x performance of our Linux boxes over our Unix workstations, and Linux boxes are much cheaper, too," Chris said on the phone. "We use Suns only for the big jobs because of the current 2-Gig limit in Red Hat."

Looks like Sun isn't just having quality and customer-support problems. In these last two months, both Synopsys and Cadence announced they were porting many of their more popular EDA tools to Linux. It's damn hard to beat cheaper and faster. Damn hard.

John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a Contract ASIC Designer and loves hearing from engineers at 'jcooley@world.std.com'or (508) 429-4357.