FPGA place and route needs a lot of memory for large designs. What's interesting is that even if the tools can't take proper advantage of a multicore processor, the OS will still allow the tool to "own" a processor so the GUI and other things aren't slowed down.

We also notice that PCB layout needs as much RAM as you can throw at it. This is especially true when your layer count starts getting ugly -- 10 or more.

We do a lot of (non-Photoshop) image processing and storage, so more RAM helps too.

Of course, it's interesting to note that both cases boil down to a database problem ...

-a