State of CAD and Engineering Workstation Technologies
Abbreviations
CAD is Computer Aided Design
CAE is Computer Aided Engineering
CEW is Computer aided design and Engineering Workstation
CPU is Central Processing Unit
GPU is Graphics Processing Unit
Hardware for CPU-Intensive Applications
Computer hardware was designed to support programs and it is a typical but simplistic view that higher spec hardware will enable all computer programs to do better. Up to recently, the CPU was indeed really the only device for computation of computer programs. Other processors embedded in a PC or workstation were dedicated to their parent devices for instance a graphics adapter card for display, a TCP-offloading card for network interfacing, along with a RAID algorithm chip for hard disk redundancy or capacity extension. However, the CPU is not the only processor for software computation. We are going to explain this in the next section.
Legacy programs still rely on the CPU to do computation. That is certainly, the regular view is valid for applications that have not taken advantage of other kinds of processors for computation. We’ve got done some benchmarking and feel that applications like Maya 03 are CPU intensive.
For CPU-intensive applications to execute faster, the rule is to have the highest CPU frequency, more CPU cores, more main memory, and possibly ECC memory (see below).
