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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Why would you get better performance from CAD in the cloud? Doesn't a cloud server have essentially the opposite performance profile from a CAD workstation, with many more cores but much slower clock rates? CAD vendors want your workstation to have a few fast cores and several GPUs.

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I imagine in the enterprise space there could be a desire to have cheap simple to manage machines to give to employees or BYOD with a subscription service to manage cloud compute resources for things like CAD. Lots of enterprises don't like being in the internal IT management and compute hardware hosting business, they're in the business of making whatever they're designing in the CAD software. We've already seen this kind of migration to cloud services for other kinds of business processes.

> CAD vendors want your workstation to have a few fast cores and several GPUs.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/quadro-virtual-work...

I think premise is either "floating workstation" or that if you please you can use laptop instead of being tied to workstation.

I wouldn't expect better performance, but you usually license software by node. Having it run on a shared server is an easy way for employees to share and work together.

Clouds are starting to focus on HPC machine types which can crank out CAD renders

I see. I guess it's technically possible for a cloud vendor to temporarily attach several GPUs to your CAD render, and afterward reassign them to someone else, therefore bringing the utilization up and the price down, it just doesn't seem like such a big market opportunity when a $20k workstation isn't that important next to the cost of the software and its operator.

dont forget that you're not tied to one workstation to do the job. makes WFH(or anywhere really) much easier, and much higher potential for easy collaboration

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