Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 22:02:02 +0000
From: Phil Tomson <freehdl@linuxeda.com>
To: lwn@lwn.net
Subject: Report: Linux vs. NT shootout at DAC

Yesterday (6/16/98) I participated in the Linux vs. NT shootout at
DAC.

THE SETTING:
DAC - The Design Automation Conference: It is the main trade show for
the EDA (Electronic Design Automation - software used in designing
electronic systems, Integrated Circuits).  This year it is being held in
San Francisco.

THE BACKGROUND:
In recent months ISD Magazine (Integrated Systems Design - a trade
publication for the Electronic Engineering community) has run a series
of editorials which ask the question "Why not Linux for EDA, instead of
WinNT?".  The EDA industry has traditionally been dominated by Unix.  In
recent years NT has made some inroads into EDA, but it is apparent that
the majority of the engineers who are the end users of EDA software are
not happy with being forced to use NT (there have been many long threads
in EDA related newsgroups - comp.lang.vhdl, comp.lang.verilog,
comp.cad.synthesis, etc - on this subject.)  The recent editorials in
ISD Magazine (http://www.isdmag.com) generated a huge pro-Linux response
which prompted ISD to host the Linux vs NT forum at DAC.
(see:http://www.isdmag.com/linuxvsnt.html for more info) 

As I mentioned above, the EDA industry has traditionally been dominated
by Unix based software primarily because of the higher performance of
Unix workstations over Windows based PCs.  Now the performance gap
between PCs and workstations is narrowing, however, thus opening the
door for Windows NT to make inroads.  EDA represents the perfect market
for Linux because: a) Linux runs on the PC platform (good
price/performance). b) Porting most EDA apps to Linux is fairly trivial
since most of them are already running on various flavors of Unix. c)
Linux is a more stable OS then NT.

THE PLAYERS:
- James Lee, Seva Technologies (an Engineering Consulting firm)
- Venktesh Shukla, VP of Marketing at Ambit (an EDA company)
- Larry Augustin, President of VA Research
- Stan Souder (sp?), a Solaris representative from Sun.
- Daniel Small, a representative from Microsoft (probably from NT group)
- Dan ____ (didn't catch last name), Marketing person from Ambit
(another EDA company)
- Phil Tomson (me) representing the FreeHDL project
(http://www.freehdl.seul.org)

There were probably about 150 people in the audience - much smaller than
expected, but I'm told that this kind of turnout was good for an offsite
forum (it was held at the SF Marriot, DAC was at Moscone).  We were also
competing with the keynote address for at least part of the time.

THE PANEL DISCUSSION:

James Lee started out by presenting benchmark information comparing the
performance of various PC configurations running NT against an
UltraSparc 60 running Solaris - NT did very well (or perhaps we should
say that the PC platform did very well).  I'm sure that Linux would do
very well (and probably better then NT for raw speed) but unfortunately
the vendors of the software tested either don't have a Linux port or
they don't want to release it for a test.  See:
http://www.isdmag.com/Editorial/1998/SpecialSection9807.html
for all of the benchmark data.

Larry Augustin presented survey data from DataPro which shows that Linux
is a very powerful player in the OS arena.  Their surveys show that
Linux is growing very fast and has the highest marks from users of any
OS for reliability. NT did not fare well in this survey.[NOTE: I don't
have a link for this survey data, it may be on the VA Research site]
Larry asked for a show of hands of people in the audience who were Linux
users - I'd estimate that it was about 80% (suddenly I felt less nervous
since it was a Linux-friendly crowd).

Next, Daniel Small of Microsoft was allowed to respond to Larry's survey
data.  He basically said that you can find surveys that support NT.
He cited some statistics on how NT is dominating the mechanical CAD
market (a totally different type of market than EDA).  There was of
course the standard line about how all the wonderful productivity apps
are on the Win platform. He went on to spread a bit of FUD by saying
that Linux is unsupported and that if anything went wrong with your chip
design that Microsoft would stand behind NT, and asked who would rescue
you if you use Linux.

Mr. Small's remarks immediately elicited a lot of questions and comments
from the audience which basically changed the format of the forum
somewhat (each member of the panel was supposed to give a small speech
on their position, but it was obvious that the audience was eager to
start asking questions.)

Someone from the audience called Mr. Small's comments on NT support into
question by noting that the NT license agreement specifically says that
M$ is not responsible for such losses and also by noting that M$
wouldn't immediately drop everything to help a small company fix such a
problem.  Mr. Small admitted as much and then said that you could at
least get a refund for NT (as if that's going to help if your big $$
project is ruined).

At this point it was pretty clear that Mr. Small had stepped into the
Lion's den ;-)

After another question or two, Mr.Shukla was asked to explain why his
company doesn't release a Linux version of their software.  He explained
that Ambit's software is very expensive ($100K) and that it requires
other software (simulators, backend) on Linux in order to be useful.  He
also claimed that in all his years at Ambit he has never seen a single
request for a Linux version of their tools (this was later disputed by
at least two members of the audience who said that they had indeed
requested a Linux version).

Dan ____ from Avant! then claimed that NT is a much easier environment
to support since there aren't a lot of versions of it around, etc.  I
responded that NT is not a pristine environment because there are
several different patches (service packs) out there and that DLLs tend
to get replaced on NT when you install new software.

Stan Souder (and this may not be quite in order) then talked a bit about
Solaris.  He was very positive about Linux and even mentioned the recent
support for Linux International by Sun.  He also made a very interesting
statement about how Solaris and Linux could eventually merge - I suspect
that this was an off-the-cuff remark and not the official Sun position,
but it was somewhat surprising anyway.

There was a question from the floor about M$'s future NT direction - "do
you have a roadmap?".  Mr. Small then responded that M$ is working on
things like remote admin and improving NT's multiuser paradigm (funny,
Linux already has these features ;-).

At least one of the audience members as well as myself brought up the
issue of scripting support (or lack thereof) on NT and how it is
critical for the EDA user.  Mr. Small responded by saying that "on a
good system there is no need for scripting".  The audience actually
booed, hissed and laughed at this remark - he wasn't winning any
friends.

There were several questions from the floor directed to the EDA
representatives asking why they don't offer Linux versions of their
software given the fact that most engineers would prefer Linux to NT.
Both the representative from Ambit and Avant! admitted that they have
Linux versions of their software internally but that they didn't feel
that there was enough demand (odd given the fact that the audience of
engineers was obviously very pro-Linux).  Mr. Shukla from Avant! even
admitted that they had done a good chunk of their development on Linux
and that they like Linux as a software development platform!

Mr. Shukla explained that in order of Linux to succeed in EDA the buyers
of such tools need to demand it and be willing to pay $$$.  Engineers
may overwhelmingly prefer Linux to NT, but managers are making the money
decisions.  This is a good point, engineers need to do a better job in
convincing their managment about Linux, but how can you convince
management to buy a product that doesn't exist?

Overall, I think the forum went very well.  I think that the audience
certainly sent a clear message to EDA vendors - "we want Linux versions
of EDA apps!".  Hopefully they'll start to get the message.

Phil Tomson
FreeHDL Project
http://www.freehdl.seul.org