The man in charge of Intel's Itanium and Xeon product lines ... to lead Cadence Design Systems.
Yeah I saw that. I wonder if Fister's departure from Intel was a good or bad one. It could go either way. I know Intel has pressed all of the big three EDA companies to port to Itanium as a priority, and the customer is always right in the EDA business. I'm sure AMD has applied similar pressure, but I would guess AMD represents a smaller portion of business than Intel for these companies given AMD's smaller and less numerous design teams. I'm sure Intel helped make some decisions on porting priority for these companies when they announced support for AMD64, although I'm sure ia64 is still on the list of ports for most tools.
I would agree with Alan and chipguy that some EDA tools will run better on Itanium, and some better on Opteron. A company buying EDA tools can buy one of each and run the tool on the best machine for the tool. I would remark that Opteron is probably the best do it all machine, but I'm not sure that matters here. The cost of the processor is so miniscule that the company is going to buy the machine that runs the EDA app the fastest. The licensing fees for some of these applications is outrageous compared to the hardware cost, which is why you spend the money on the best hardware for the app to get the most out of the license.
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