Electronics software on MacBook Pro

[neom]

Hi.

Somebody are using MacBook Pro running Windows to use electronics software like Altium, Keil, ...? It's workds well?
I whant to buy a MacBook Pro 15'' but I need to run this software.

Thank you.

[allegro]

Hi,

I have used Cadence and some other tools on the mac, but I used VMware running Win7. Another option might be to use parallels. Not so much cad tools running natively on the mac.

However, some good editors and ide's are running natively on mac.

[neom]

Hello allegro.

If I buy the mac I will use VMware or Parallels too. Did you have a good experience using Cadence on Mac\VMware?

Thanks.

[fpgaguy]

no you will not have a good experience - Mac's (sorry) are very underpowered and tend to throttle the CPU to meet thermals, running in a VM only exacerbates that problem.
it seriously depends on the size of your layouts and schematics - I'm in the 50-80Mb schematic range and into the 80-120Mb layouts - so for me NO not good experience with cadence/allegro. Altium is even slower

[allegro]

I don't know how many megabytes my designs were on the mac, but I guess you could call them from small to medium sized (between ~400 to ~2000 pins), and I don't recall being annoyed with speed. I also did a lot of vhdl/systemc simulations, but that can be timeconsuming on most platforms depending on size and type of simulation. Also used Proteus on VMware without any problems.

I have a Macbook Pro 16Gb ram and solid state disk.

But, for sure VMware/Parallels emulation will not perform as well as running native. I think you have 2 choices when installing on VMware; running from big file or running from a disk partition. Experts on this can answer better regarding the different options and related performance:-) I ran from within the mac filesystem (big file). In any case it solved a problem for me, and I could do some serious work using my mac:-)