( ESNUG 329 Item 1 ) --------------------------------------------- [9/22/99]
Subject: ( ESNUG 327 #2 ) Customers Excited About The Ambit 80% Price Cut
> Synopsys is going to a "new price structure", which is a thinly disguised
> price increase. It may look like you can same money with their "5 year
> deal" which locks you into their tools for 5 years, but read the fine
> print, you don't. Some tools went up as much as 40% ...
>
> I'm being forced to drop some tools, some of which actually had some
> promise, off of maintenance and just go with the core tools to stay within
> my maintenance budget (which is fixed). Is there as much "snarling and
> gnashing of teeth" about this out there as there is here?
>
> - [ Kenny From South Park ]
From: "Ed Beers" <sreeb@doctordesign.com>
John,
I'm surprised that you had no comment in ESNUG on Cadence's Ambit recent
80 percent cost reduction. At $25K, it looks very compelling. Certainly,
convincing my management that they should fork over 10X for the Synopsys
version would be a tricky task if I needed to do it today.
- Ed Beers, Project Manager
Doctor Design Inc. San Diego, CA
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From: Brian Walkington <bwalk@sdd.hp.com>
John,
You've no doubt heard the news that Cadence has slashed the price of Ambit
BuildGates to $25k. My question is: with Synopsys effectively raising the
price of Design Compiler, and many testimonials that BuildGates is as good
or better than DC, why stay with DC? Is there anything that DC can do that
BuildGates can't?
- Brian Walkington while on contract at Hewlett-Packard
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: apm@technologist.com ( Paul Marriott )
Dear John,
I'm an ASIC design and verification consultant currently working for Nortel
in Ottawa and Miranda Technologies in Montreal. I recently saw your remarks
about Cadence 80 percent price cut on Ambit tools in EE Times and wanted to
disagree with what you said. Quote:
"A lot of customers are angry about Synopsys raising prices 20 to
40 percent. Cadence cutting prices by 80 percent is a very clever
tactical maneuver to grab market share." ... "They didn't get
$100,000 for copies of Ambit, I know that. They were practically
giving them away to get customers to use them."
Well, as for Ambit not getting $100,000 per copy, that's not quite true,
since Miranda Technologies in Montreal <http://www.miranda.com> was a
customer who did pay somewhere in that ballpark (though with a discount).
At the time (November of '98), the price worked out at around 20-25 percent
cheaper than a comparably configured Synopsys license. Ambit certainly
wasn't giving seats away, that's for sure!
How we came to purchase those Ambit seats was very colorful.
I was working on a joint project with 3 companies (Miranda included) and a
university in Montreal. We developed a really neat SIMD architecture for
video DSP and we used Synopsys to synthesize it (using an educational
license -- all legal and correct since this was under a Quebec government
program called Project Synergy which was designed to fund pre-commercial
research). At the end of the project, we wanted to build a commercial
version of the architecture we had developed. We planned on spinning out a
company and buying a proper commercial Synopsys license for the synthesis
of this new chip. We approached Synopsys for a quote for a "reasonable"
configuration of tools and DesignWare parts for this.
It was three months before Synopsys would even return calls. Then they
started going to people who'd left the project, revealing confidential
information to them and trying to get them to say that we'd been using an
illegal license all along and making vague threats about a university in
Montreal going to be prosecuted for such a violation.
All of this was very underhanded.
I was extremely annoyed that they had revealed some confidential details of
our RFQ to a former employee of the project. Finally, when they did give us
a quote, they said that the license could only be used **for one specific
project** and they would take legal action if we used it for anything else.
I thought this was pretty dubious, to say the least. I think they were
paranoid that we would try and use educational seats for the work ( which
really makes no sense since if really had wanted to do that because we
wouldn't have been trying to spend upwards of $100k with them in the first
place then!) Needless to say, I was less than impressed with their sales
tactics. It seemed that they really weren't interested in doing business
with a small company. (Big hint for Synopsys sales people: all companies
start out small).
Around that time, I decided to take a look at the Ambit tools to see if
they were good enough to compete. They were more than happy to give me
evaluation licenses, sent up FAEs and generally behaved like decent people.
Our spin-off never happened (for various other reasons, though the Synopsys
stuff didn't help), and I ended up going to work full time for Miranda,
starting up an ASIC group. Miranda then followed my advice and bought an
Ambit seat (at full price minus a discount that I negotiated). At that
time, Ambit had just been purchased by Cadence, but they honoured the price
I'd negotiated prior to the take over.
Working for a small company, it was frustratingly difficult to get any
quote at all from Synopsys, whereas Ambit were more than happy to take my
business. I've been impressed with the technical support since and the QOR
I'm getting is very close to what I was getting with Synopsys for similar
designs previously.
It's also quite refreshing to be able to speak to the Ambit person who
actually wrote the code when there was a problem or two to solve.
With this recent 80 percent Ambit price cut, I was worried that I would be
stuck with overpriced licenses, but my Ambit sales representative has given
me a great deal (which I can't reveal here) to make up the difference and
allow me to use the distributed synthesis capability of the new Envisia
version of Ambit. I was also worried that the Cadence take over would mean
less support for small accounts like Miranda's, but so far this hasn't been
the case at all.
One final point, since Ambit fully supports VHDL-93 constructs, it is _much_
easier to integrate RTL code with existing VHDL-93 coded testbenches rather
than having to jump through some of the hoops I've had to in the past
because of Synopsys being stuck in the dark-ages with VHDL-87.
I'd quite like to see more Ambit-related discussion on ESNUG -- perhaps the
"S" should really be Synthesis rather than Synopsys?
- Dr. Paul Marriott
Marriott Design Services Montreal, Canada
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