General > General Technical Chat
[Banter] What is the worst software you have used for its price?
bd139:
I don’t think it’s that. It’s just we have multi core machines and single core programmers.
I tend to buy the fastest single core machine on the market where I can because of this. This is currently an M1 Pro for me as that’s the only package that doesn’t burn 150 watts.
tom66:
I'll throw an FPGA one in - I'm not a big fan of Microsemi (now Microchip) Libero. The software has a very old synthesis and place-and-route engine and doesn't appear to support multi threading.
I can complete a 30k LUT design in Vivado in about 12 minutes on my Ryzen laptop, as it will use all 8 cores for parts of the PnR and 2 cores for much of the synthesis process. OOC stuff also uses all available threads. Meanwhile Libero will do a single thread throughout the build and will take over 60 minutes for an equivalent design.
A "Gold" licence of the Libero software is quite expensive for what you get (essential for building most designs), especially as Xilinx's Vivado WebPACK is free and lets you build for most sub-$200 FPGAs they sell.
I won't sing the praises of Vivado - it's not fantastic by any means - but it could be a lot worse.
dmills:
I will see you the crapness that is PADS and raise you to the stratospheric heights of awfulness that is <Drumroll> DxDesigner!
Ghod what a pile of fetid dingoes kidneys, it is like they spent 20 minutes with an EE talking about schematic design tools, then filtered the result thru the CEOs son who was interning that month before handing the result to a bunch of coding 'bootcamp' graduates, and applying a QA process consisting of "Does it Compile? Does it Link? Then ship it already. It really is THAT useless.
I should add an honourable mention for using FlexLM for licensing, possibly the least user friendly license manager ever invented.
Codemonkey:
PADS
PCad (most unhelpful library editor known to man and the PCB layout editor has no simple way of turning on or off layer visibility).
Not used it myself, but we have a number of licenses for EPlan for wiring loom drawings. Apparently it was dreadful, buggy and the support was crap so we just stopped using it despite it costing loads.
free_electron:
--- Quote from: dmills on May 22, 2022, 04:13:44 pm ---I will see you the crapness that is PADS and raise you to the stratospheric heights of awfulness that is <Drumroll> DxDesigner!
Ghod what a pile of fetid dingoes kidneys, it is like they spent 20 minutes with an EE talking about schematic design tools,
--- End quote ---
you should see the replacement for Cadence schematic capture now that they have ditched the orcad leftovers . it's stuck in 1984
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