I am an electrical engineering student looking to build a desktop computer. That being said, I would like to configure it to run common EE tasks as efficiently as possible. Therefore, I am trying to form a list of common EE tasks and the resources they use. I am curious to see if there is anything I missed.
- FPGA development (simulation, synthesis, implementation, ...)
- Primarily single-threaded (from what I have seen so far). A faster clock speed may actually be noticeable.
- Very CPU-intensive, almost no graphics
- A lot of memory/cache space
- Possibly large amounts of disk I/O (depending on complexity of design)
- Circuit Simulation
- More graphics-intensive than FPGA development
- Possibly concurrent, may involve operations such as matrix multiplication and FFT, which could potentially be offloaded to the GPU
- Less disk I/O
- Memory depends on circuit complexity and simulation detail
- MCU development
- IDE is often large and uses a lot of memory
- The compilation process for small processors shouldn't be too bad, but optimization may take more processing.
- Little to no GPU usage
- Is emulation common? If it is, that can be quite complex.
- Debugging can vary, but I would expect it to not use much processing power since the computation is not happening on the host machine.
- PCB design software
- General mathematical software (Matlab/Octave, SciLab, Sage, ...)