KeyShot 3 includes a new, patent-pending animation system, major improvements to the UI and workflow and over 400 new materials and new importers for NX, Parasolid, JT, Solid Edge and SolidWorks for PC and Mac.

KeyShot 3 Features

KeyShot features a brand new realtime 3D animation system that is geared towards designers, engineers and marketing professionals, not animation and rendering studio professionals. This makes it easy for users to quickly produce high-quality results. KeyShot 3 breaks down the complexity when creating part and camera animations from 3D models.

Rather than rely on keyframes, a traditional approach to animation, KeyShot 3 introduces a new and patent-pending system based on offset transforms. These transforms can be combined to create complex part and camera animations. Animations can be output to AVI, Apple QuickTime and Adobe Flash.

The user interface has been greatly improved. New areas include improved model interaction, redesigned library section, better material editing, texture mapping and general dialog cleanup.

KeyShot 3 now has more pipeline options for both Mac and PC. All formats are now supported on both Mac or PC as well, so Mac-based users can grab and import file formats associated with traditionally Windows-only based CAD programs. Some highlights include new support for NX 8 and prior with ability to control tessellation. Same goes for Parasolid, making KeyShot an option for Vectorworks users since that program is based on the Parasolid kernel. FBX importer now supports part animation that can be imported and played back.

To see all the features in detail visit them online at: www.keyshot.com

In the past Chris has spoken to Architosh about the detailed relationship between Apple hardware engineering and AMD/ATi, and the various details that shape the decision-making process in hardware design and the resultant performance realities for users. Our “state of the union” style series wouldn’t be complete without a serious fireside chat with Chris Bentley. He has been on the extreme inside tract of Apple’s Mac hardware engineering like no other outside Apple for many years.

So let’s get in real close and talk about Mac graphics!

AFR: (Anthony Frausto-Robledo): In your role you are on the inside track of hardware development. Can you describe to me briefly the importance AMD/ATi plays in supporting Apple’s Mac graphics hardware advances? To what degree is AMD/ATi an influence on Apple’s decisions?

CB: (Chris Bentley): Apple is relentlessly innovative both in software and hardware, and especially in the combination of the two.  I looked back over the interview we did in January 2007;  apart from being a good read, I am struck by the fact that it came out just on the cusp of Apple introducing the first iPhone.  Since then Apple has shipped multiple generations of the iPhone, the iPod Touch, the iPad, the iPad 2, the MacBook Air, and numerous laptop and desktop systems.  All of these devices are powered by OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics.  I think it’s fairly well accepted that Apple has shipped more OpenGL accelerated devices than any one else on the planet.

AMD works closely with Apple on both the software and hardware sides.  The software we write for Apple is entirely customized for Mac OS X.  Since 2007 we have added support for the Radeon HD 2xxx, 3xxx, 4xxx, 5xxx, 6xxx chip families, and added support for OpenGL 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, encompassing over 30 new features and extensions, as well as OpenCL 1.0, 1.1, and hardware accelerated H.264 decode support in Lion.  Delivering OpenGL 3.2 and the other features in Lion required Apple and AMD engineers to work hand-in-glove for months.  On the hardware side, Apple receives regular presentations on our hardware roadmap, and for every Apple program using AMD GPUs, our hardware engineers work closely with Apple throughout the bringup and production phases.

So, I would say that we are deeply invested in supporting Apple’s innovation in graphics software and hardware.  I think the relationship is more about working together, and less about our influencing them.

AFR: For years many Mac pros have lamented the lack of GPU options and specific pro-level cards. But over the past several years Apple has done much better. What do you feel are some of the decisive factors affecting Apple’s decisions in what GPU cards to support? And how much better would you describe the situation today than say seven or ten years ago?

next page: Pro Apps and OpenGL Performance

The company’s graphics solutions will be powering a range of new 3D and CAD applications useful to designers, engineers and digital content professionals. Industry leaders such as Autodesk, Adobe and Dassault Systemes will be on hand to highlight new tools and techniques that take advantage of Nvidia Professional graphics solutions.

Features and Events

There will be a range of interesting events taking place during the conference. These include:

• Nvidia-sponsored Autodesk Student Experience – Aug 7 , 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. Held at the Vancouver Marriott Pinnacle Downtown Hotel
• Nvidia Tech Talks – Aug 8 , 9:00 am – 5:30 pm. Held in the West Building, Room 220.
• Nvidia Innovation Theater – held all three days Aug 9, 10 and 11 in the booth.
• Nvidia Sketch Match. Sponsored by Dell, contestants race the clock to compete against fellow illustrators, animators and designers for great prizes.
• NVArt Competition. Nvidia and the CGSociety put this on

Nvidia will also be demonstrating and giving away three new just-announced ThinkPad Tablets from Lenovo in the Nvidia booth during SIGGRAPH.

To learn more about Nvidia go to: www.nvidia.com

Code named “Rogue” the new GPU technology is said to lead the industry in performance. Imagination stated in a press release that six lead partners have thus far licensed the design. Three of these include ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments and MediaTek. Three others have yet to announce. It is not clear if Apple is among the three mysterious licensees.

Imagination CEO Hossein Yassaie said, “The growing commitment of the primary players to our roadmap shows that, having evaluated the options, the overall market and embedded market is increasingly committing to POWERVR as the de facto graphics standard.” Again, Apple is one of those “primary” players in the market.

Apple normally would have released the iPhone 5 this month if it held its annual June refresh timeline. The company however is delayed in the release of the next iPhone (5), yet it is not clear if iOS 5 and iCloud are the sole reasons for this delay.

Apple is an investor in Imagination Technologies. To learn more about the new POWERVR Series 6 from Imagination Technologies go here.

For the next two webinars register today for the first two webinars in this new program.

Details

Wednesday, June 15 from 9:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. PDT, Dr. David Luebke, Director of Research at NVIDIA will present GPU Computing: Past, Present & Future.

Wednesday, July 13 from 9:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. PDT, Dr. Rob Farber, published author and GPU Computing expert will present The Practical Reality of Heterogeneous Super Computing.

A quick summary of the latest key elements of the CUDA 4.0 include:

• Nvidia GPUDirect 2.0 Technology — offers support for peer-to-peer communication between GPUs within a single server or workstation. This enables easier and faster multi-GPU programming and application performance
• Unified Virtual Addressing (UVA) — provides a single merged-memory address space for the main system memory and the GPU memories, enabling quicker and easier parallel programming
• Thrust C++ Template Performance Primitives Libraries — provides a collection of powerful open source C++ parallel algorithms and data structures that ease programming for C++ developers. With Thrust, routines such as parallel sorting are 5x to 100x faster

01 - Nvidia's CUDA website is showcasing CUDA 4.0's release.

The new Mac OS X support includes new features in CUDA-GDB. A release candidate for CUDA Toolkit 4.0 will be available free of  charge beginning March 4, 2011. You can enroll in the CUDA developer program here: www.nvidia.com/paralleldeveloper

To learn more about CUDA go here.

Nvidia Quadro 4000 GPU for Mac

The high-end Nvidia Quadro 4000 GPU for Mac, with 256 Nvidia CUDA processing cores and 2GB of GDDR5 memory, delivers exceptional graphics performance across a broad range of design, animation and video applications. With the new Nvidia Scalable Geometry Engine technology, the Quadro 4000 for Mac can process up to 890 million triangles per second, enabling professionals to design, iterate and deliver quality results in less time.

The Quadro 4000 for Mac supports a memory bandwidth of 89.6 GB/sec., over a 256 bit memory interface. It’s maximum display resolution is 2560×1600 pixels and it supports 3D stereo via a 3-pin Mini-DIN port. Shader Model 5.0, OpenGL 4.1 and Microsoft DirectX 11 round out support architectures.

The price for the Nvidia Quadro 4000 for Mac is 1199.USD and will be available from Apple directly and from select Apple resellers and system integrators. Requirements include: Mac OS X v10.6.5 or later, Mac Pro3,1 (early 2008), MacPro4,1 (early 2009) or MacPro 5,1 (mid-2010). To learn more visit this web page.

KeyShot 2 is built on Luxion’s production-proven interactive realtime raytracing and global illumination technology. Now even faster, KeyShot 2 breaks down the complexity of creating photographic images from 3D models. Key new features in KeyShot 2 include:

• Drag and Drop import of digital data
• Scene tree for better scene management
• Library for all assets (materials, environments, textures, backplates and renderings) with drag and drop capabilities
• Interactive material and environmental adjustments with realtime feedback
• Dynamic camera interaction with precise position control

There are also several new rendering improvements and capabilities including:

• Unlimited label placement on any material
• Ligt emitting materials with intensity, color and appearance control
• Ground caustics without need for a physical plane
• Merging of previously saved scenes with current scene

Performance improvements include 50 percent faster renders. The program has been optimized to run even faster on Macs and PCs without the need for special graphics cards. KeyShot is 50 percent faster than HyperShot.

KeyShot has been optimized for round-trip fidelity between itself and Pro/ENGINEER. Models can be re-imported from ProE and previously made material assignments are maintained.

To learn more visit Luxion online here: http://www.luxion.com/

OpenGL 4.0 and OpenCL

Apple-invented open industry standard OpenCL is now more closely aligned and interoperable with OpenGL via OpenGL 4.0. New new features in OpenGL 4.0 include:

• Core and Compatibility OpenGL 3.2 profiles retain backwards compatibility;
• two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU;
• per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shaders,
• drawing of data generated by OpenGL or external APIs such as OpenCL without main CPU intervention;
• shader subroutines for better programming flexibility;
• new object type called “sampler objects” provide separation of texture state and texture data;
• 64-bit double precision floating point shader operations and quality;
• performance improvements, included instanced geometry, instanced shaders, instanced arrays and a new timer query.

The Khronos Group has also released an OpenGL 3.3 specification, together with the set of ARB extensions, to enable some OpenGL 4.0 functionality in previous generation GPU hardware.

It is unclear at this time when operating systems vendors will support the new OpenGL 4.0 standard. For more information visit this link.

The 2008 Mac touch Concept

Let’s recap the  2008 January details of what we imagined (both Sheehan and Architosh) the future touch-based device would be like. Here were are essentials:

• Apple multi-touch based input
• 11 inch sized screen
• iPhone like front device appearance
• solid state memory (64-128 GB)
• Intel-based primary CPU
• ATI graphics
• ARM secondary processing unit
• modified Mac OS X operating system

In the last two years we have learned quite a bit of information that makes this earlier attempt at imagining the Mac touch incorrect. For starters, as we look at the list above, it is the second half of those bullet points that get very particular and hence very subject to change. Yet some of our concepts about “use” are likely spot on.

One reader's vision of what a Mac touch would look like, pictured here next to Black Mac Book

The Updated View

First of all in terms of a name Apple will likely surprise us this time. iSlate, iTablet, iScreen, Mac touch…unlike the iPhone name, which was obvious, there is no single name that makes perfect sense. One name that hasn’t been bandied about too much is iPad. This harks back of course to the Newton MessagePad, which Steve Jobs despised. The word “Pad” is likely not in the upcoming product name. If we hark back further we can look at Apple’s Juggarnaut Design Investigation which studied a touch-based device this size and that device was given the name WorkCase. There are just so many possibilities…we’ll just have to wait and see!

Getting back to the details we can now make some 2010 revisions to our 2008 ideas. Here is what Architosh believes will likely be introduced today:

• 10 inch computer screen, touch-based (Multi-touch)
• next-generation iPhone OS (which itself is a variant of the basis of Mac OS X)
• ARM-Architecture CPU (in-house Apple design a very real possibility here!!)
• Imagination Technologies GPU (PowerVR variant)

Further Details on Apple’s Announcement Today

We stick to our belief that the new touch based device will be able to serve two very distinguished groups of users who do not need the true-typing experience that can only be found on a laptop. We said this two years ago and we stand by this assumption for this new product. So let’s recap these groups and how the new device fits them:

Group One: Media Consumers

As we mentioned before we believe that “consumer computing is now the place where the ledging edge now exist” and this has only grown stronger since that last article. The new Apple tablet device will be a game-changer in software and a best-in-breed in hardware for this category. Expect more or less all of this:

• Direct Kindle competition: Apple will change the rules about how we obtain and consume the written word (books, magazines and maybe webzines) in much the same way they did with music with iTunes.
• Gaming: Apple’s iPhone is a stunning success in the world of gaming and the new tablet device will continue to push this success even further. Leading edge OpenGL ES  combined with superior best-in-breed GPU hardware (Imagination Technologies?) and innovative API in the OS will propel this device forward.
• Movies, TV and Music: As we emphasized before a wired connection to iTunes on the computer (a la AppleTV) can make the slate device a great movie watching screen in bed or on the couch.

Group Two: Professional Vertical and Education

We also said that light typers need a device that is touch based and is ideal for the field. This means medicine, science, field workers in many industries, including AEC (architecture, engineering, construction) to education. We don’t see Apple emphasizing this today but the fundamental technologies that are there for gaming will make this a great platform for many of these vertical professional applications.

• Architecture, engineering and construction (AEC). This industry needs a great touch-screen with pen-input option platform badly. Viewing a big book is really no different than viewing a big set of construction drawings. Multi-touch opens up so many possibilities.
• Medicine is an ideal place for the new tablet from Apple. Doctors today already use the iPhone and iPod touch for similar use today
• Sciences: field and lab can utilize a touch-based device
• Field workers in all industries today rely on a multitude of platforms but none of them have the promise and capability of the iPhone OS and eco-system of software development and distribution

Closing Comments

Apple’s future will be revealed at 1:00pm EST as Steve Jobs hits the stage in San Francisco. It will be exciting to see what he introduces. We know that Apple has been working on a fifth product category for many years because Jobs said so years ago.

What will really be stunning today is if Apple has based the device on its own silicon design–namely that it has utilized its PA Semi group it acquired a few years ago to design a custom ARM Architecture main processor (CPU). This will mark a big moment for Apple for it will mean that the company is willing to compete with Intel and other semi-conductor designers head-to-head in order to differentiate itself from its competition.

In Brief. Autodesk has acquired software assets from UK-based 3AM Solutions, a privately held company that develops visualization software for civil infrastructure. Dynamite VSP and Dynamite SIM technology will help Autodesk the process of creating visualization for projects made with Autodesk Civil 3D software. Dynamite VSP offers simple and efficient ways to bring Autodesk Civil 3D software data into Autodesk 3ds Max design software. The full press release is here.

AIA Report says BIM Use Increased Substantially

According to the newest report by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), architects using Building Information Modeling (BIM) software increased from 34 percent in 2005 to 69 percent in 2008.

Graphisoft ArchiCAD 13 Events Upcoming

Graphisoft has a number of ArchiCAD 13 events coming up this month starting this week. Here is a brief breakdown:

• Jan 6 – ArchiCAD User Group, Oakland, CA
• Jan 7 – IIT College of Architecture – BIM Training Workshop, Chicago, IL
• Jan 11 – 2D Drawing Coordination with Consultants – Exporting DWG, PDF and JPG Files – Online Training
• Jan 13 – So What’s In A Template, Anyway? Calgary, AB
• Jan 13 – ArchiCAD User Group, Seattle, WA

Mac 3D News

Interesting post about Intel’s work on cracking the issue of sharing data between Core and Xeon CPUs and Larrabee GPU co-processors. Future Core and Xeon chips will be able to create a “virtual” shared memory pool that both the CPU and GPU can access so datasets are nto crunched down, serialized, and moved over the slower PCI-Express bus from CPU to GPU, this report discusses.

We know that Apple is working within the OS level to speed up standardized operations so they can be efficiently distributed among available processing cores on both the CPU and GPU levels simultaneously.

There is also a recent post at the same link above about Apple’s OpenCL FFT lib producing very high performance.

OpenGL 3.2

OpenGL 3.2 is the third major update in twelve months to the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API (application programming interface). This new release continues the rapid evolution of the OpenGL standard to enable graphics developers to portably access cutting-edge GPU functionality across diverse operating systems and platforms. 

OpenGL 3.2 adds features for enhanced performance, increased visual quality, accelerated geometry processing and easier portability of Direct3D applications. In addition, the evolution of OpenGL and other standards within the Khronos, including OpenCL for parallel computing, OpenGL ES, and the new WebGL standard for 3D on the Web, are being coordinated to create a powerful graphics and compute ecosystem that spans many applications, markets and devices. The installed base of OpenGL 3.2 compatible GPUs already exceeds 150 million units. New features include:

• increased performance for vertex arrays and fence sync objects to avoid idling while waiting for resource shared by between CPU and GPU, or multiple CPU threads
• Improved pipeline programmability, including geometry shaders in the OpenGL core,
• Boosted cube map visual quality and multisampling rendering flexibility by enabling shaders to directly process texture samples

To learn more you can read this report link at the Khronos Group website.

EVGA GTX 285 Mac Edition

GTX 285 Mac Edition is the highest performing graphics card for the Mac platform today, touts both EVGA and Nvidia. Featuring over 1 GB of DDR3 memory and 240 processing cores, this fully CUDA capable GPU card can drive two 30 inch displays at very high resolutions simultaneously.

This slots it in above ATI Radeon HD 4870 and the Nvidia Quadro FX 4800 for Mac. Although the latter has 1.5 GB of total memory and 192 parallel processing cores, the GTX 285 for Mac has 1 GB of memory, 240 processing cores and the widest memory interface (512 bit) we’ve seen on a Mac thus far. 

It outperforms in pure memory bandwidth delivering over 159 GB/ sec compared to 115 GB/ sec for the Radeon HD 4870 and 76.8 GB/ sec for the Quadro 4800. 

More Choices for Mac Pros

Interestingly, Apple does not offer this card yet as a BTO (build-to-order) option on its Apple Store online website. Neither does it offer the Nvidia Quadro 4800 workstation card. 

However it does offer all these cards as accessories to add to your Mac Pro. Listed below are the cards and prices at Apple as of this writing:

• EVGA GeForce GTX 285 — (theoretically the fastest) $449.USD
• ATI Radeon HD 4870 — (theoretically the next fastest) $349.USD
• Nvidia Quadro FX 4800 — (theoretically the next fastest) $1,799.USD
• Nvidia GeForce GT 120 — (default Mac Pro card) $149.USD

Quadro FX 4800 for Mac Pro

“Some of the world’s most challenging visual computing problems are solved on the Mac platform,” said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions, NVIDIA. “The Quadro FX 4800 provides the power and speed to meet these demanding requirements.”

To address the needs of the Mac user, the new Quadro FX 4800 GPU for Mac features a standard 3-pin stereo connector for true 3D stereoscopic imaging; critical to many core professional Mac applications. Designed, tested and built by Nvidia to meet the ultra-high standards of the Mac community, the Quadro FX 4800 GPU dynamically allocates compute, geometry, shading and pixel processing power. 

Performance Specs

The Nvidia Quadro FX 4800 for Mac Pro offers some stunning performance specifications. For starters it supports a massive 1.5GB of memory frame buffer (vRAM) and memory bandwidth of 76.8GB/sec to deliver high throughput for interactive visualization of large models; high performance of real time processing of large textures and frames; and the highest quality and resolution with full scene anti-aliasing (FSAA). 

Other key features include:

• Nvidia’s CUDA parallel architecture for Nvidia Quadro GPUs
• Dual Dual Link DVI and Stereo Connectors – outfitted with dedicated 3-pin min-din connector for stereo glasses support and up to two dual-link DVI digital connectors
• Apple Boot Camp Support – access to native Quadro GPU accelerated professional Windows 3D applications performance when running Windows via Boot Camp. 

To learn more visit here.

Building on CrossFire

ATI (AMD’s graphics subsidiary) developed CrossFire as an interconnect technology to enable multiple GPUs to work together on single problems. CrossFire accelerates applications by tasking each GPU with a portion of a rendering workload. AMD (ATI) is building on its experience with by releasing the new WGL_AMD_GPU_association. This extension allows applications to make decisions about what portion of the work to task to what GPU (in the case of multiple GPU systems). 

New workstation class applications, like CAD, CAE, DCC (digital content creation), now make use of this extension to determine what types of GPUs are in a given system (computer) and pick which contexts to allocate on each GPU. This allows a workstation application to process multiple images and datasets simultaneously and combine the final image for display. 

GPU Association is currently available in Catalyst 9.1. The extension specification can be found in the OpenGL extension registry. 

To learn more about OpenGL click here.

A couple of quick emails led to a telephone interview and conversation with longtime SketchUp product manager, John Bacus. John does an excellent job of describing the latest addition to what has become a staple in the architectural world for conceptual modeling.

Discussing SketchUp 7 Pro

AFR: John, first I want to congratulate you guys on quite an amazing update. There are some real impressive features in SU 7.

John Bacus (JB): Thanks, we went dark for quite awhile.

AFR: Yeah, I was really beginning to wonder…but now I see what Google has been working on. The Dynamic Components feature is really quite extensive. Where can users go to learn more about Dynamic Components and how to make sophisticated things like stairs?

JB: There are a couple of places…

The best place we would recommend to learn more about Dynamic Components is to look at other Dynamic Components. We have shipped some with SketchUp 7 Pro and there are others you can find on 3D Warehouse. You can also learn more by watching the YouTube videos on the SketchUp Channel.

SketchUp 7 Pro - Dynamic Component: Google Provided Stair

AFR: Are those on 3D Warehouse produced by Google?

JB: Some are Google-produced and some are by others. Some are by manufacturers, like Marvin Windows. With their windows you can size them to the limits in which they can manufacturer them.

AFR: What about learning more as to the mathematical and logical functions that you see under the Functions tab? Where does one learn how to apply those?

“If you go to some other larger standards bodies, it’s quite normal for a standard to take five years or more,” said Neil Trevett, CEO of Khronos. The team pushed the limit in order to meet Apple’s time-frame for consideration in the next release of OS X, Snow Leopard. 

“The fact that if we could hit this impossible deadline [Apple] would support it in Snow Leopard was a huge plus to us,” said Tim Mattson of Intel who has worked on the standard. 

OpenCL, which stands for Open Computing Language enables compute-intensive applications to take advantage of both multi-core CPU’s and today’s very powerful GPU’s (graphics processing units). It is C-based (language) for wide inclusion within the programming market and is fully open and royalty-free. OpenCL is managed by the Khronos Group (like OpenGL is) and is backed by leading tech giants such as Apple, Intel, AMD, ARM, Freescale, Qualcomm, 3DLabs and others.

Intel’s Killing Games…

Alex quotes Mark Rein who famously stated: “Intel are killing games.”

Yes, Intel chips, hence the plural. Mark was referring to the fact that Intel’s Integrated Graphics are weak and cannot run games well at all (and pro apps for that matter). Yet they are, as Alex notes, hugely popular with notebook OEMs because they are cheap. With such large volumes of such machines in circulation it has forced developers of games to develop around them. That of course is bad. Developers are wasting precious development resources trying to make the best out a mass of “low-performers” while ignoring the capabilities of much higher performing (but more rare…and more costly!) mobile GPU architectures. 

Nvidia Saves Games…

In comes Nvidia. And with the new 9400M platform you get blazing performance over Intel’s Integrated Graphics — as demonstrated beautifully in Apple’s newest MacBooks.

So is Apple in love with Nvidia now? Is that why two Intel executives recently got scolded for bashing the iPhone at an Intel developer summit in Asia? First the uncertainty of the PA Semi acquisition and now the Nvidia 9400M. Both of those moves amply demonstrate that Jobs & Co. have no cronies in Cupertino. For them, it’s all business, all the time. And so…while it may not be love, it certainly isn’t getting any warmer between Apple and Intel. 

To read Alex’s complete post go here.

http://themacgamer.com/2008/10/23/apple-heart-nvidia/

The Standard has a good article here. Of all the companies it mentions that Apple should buy the one I would agree makes the best sense is Nvidia. The graphics chip maker could be bought six times over with Apple’s available cash. Once more, Nvidia has been delivering superb new GPU and related technologies for the past few years, its CUDA architecture is of particular note. With Nvidia in Apple’s hands the geniuses within its PA Semi acquisition and the geniuses within Nvidia could do magical things together. It’s truly exciting to think about!

But There’s More…

I’ve been writing about specific acquisitions this past year that make sense strategically for protecting and growing Apple’s “Creatives” market. Specifically I’ve put out the notion that Apple should possibly buy Nemetschek AG of Germany as a solid AEC industry play. I’ve also written about a Gehry Technolgies buy. Both are interesting for a variety of reasons. And both would excite the AEC (architecture/engineering/construction) market and its millions of users.

So in light of that it’s interesting to see somebody outside of the CAD press discuss the idea that Apple should buy Autodesk. But that is just what David Morgenstern of ZDNet did today. Yes…it seems Apple’s big cash numbers have gotten the speculation engines oh-running. I can hear them churning across the blogosphere. The CAD blogs and press will no doubt pick up on this. It is always interesting when the general press catches up to what some of us in the CAD press have been saying.

Personally I’m not sure buying Autodesk would be a brilliant move for Apple. They would pay a premium for some de-facto industry standard apps that are in truth fairly mediocre at best. In time such apps will die-out. On the other hand, Morgenstern is correct is stating that  Apple’s approach to its customers is similar to Apple’s. This was the point I was making earlier in the year.

Would an Apple-Autodesk or Apple-Nvidia acquisition make sense to you? Login and share you thoughts below.