What are common EE computer tasks? [closed]

Question

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, ...)

Answer 1

As you noted, most EE tasks are CPU and memory intensive, but do not generally require high-performance graphics.

However, an EE may find himself doing some mechanical design as well, or even just doing a 3-D view of a PCB design. Running any sort of 3-D display software will benefit from having a good GPU with plenty of display memory.

Make sure you have a good plan for organizing (with revision/release control) and backing up your design data.