FPGA Central

Hi,

could somebody suggest hi-performance workstation I can use to compile my
designs in a fastest possible way?

I use Altera Quartus III and EP1C12Q240 device. It 90% full with most of the
memory used. My Athlon XP 1800+ on ASUS A7V266-C motherboard with 512M of
RAM takes 8/23 minutes to compile/fit. I did try dual Xeon 2200 on TYAN MB
and it did only 5% faster..

Did somebody try Athlon 64-bit processor?

--
Dennis

In article <[email protected]>, DK <[email protected]> wrote:
>could somebody suggest hi-performance workstation I can use to compile my
>designs in a fastest possible way?
>
>I use Altera Quartus III and EP1C12Q240 device. It 90% full with most of the
>memory used. My Athlon XP 1800+ on ASUS A7V266-C motherboard with 512M of
>RAM takes 8/23 minutes to compile/fit. I did try dual Xeon 2200 on TYAN MB
>and it did only 5% faster..

If it doesn't swap, getting the latest is a small but substantial
speed increase, but you aren't going to see an order of magnitude
faster anytime soon.

One of the problems is just that many of the techniques are memory
latency bound, and memory latency is not getting better. Others are
cache bound, and the Athlons have pretty good cache, but cache is
still a bottleneck.

AFAIK, none of the programs are yet dual-processor or SMT optimized,
if they were, a dual SMT P4 machine would be good, but as I said, not
currently.

>Did somebody try Athlon 64-bit processor?

The 64 bit athlon's real improvement is going to be on address space
size, which will matter on the largest designs, not on performance.
--
Nicholas C. Weaver [email protected]

DK wrote:
> Hi,
>
> could somebody suggest hi-performance workstation I can use to compile my
> designs in a fastest possible way?
>
> I use Altera Quartus III and EP1C12Q240 device. It 90% full with most of the
> memory used. My Athlon XP 1800+ on ASUS A7V266-C motherboard with 512M of
> RAM takes 8/23 minutes to compile/fit. I did try dual Xeon 2200 on TYAN MB
> and it did only 5% faster..

Your machine is fine. 23 minutes is not bad.
Consider using more simuation before synthesis.
A sim is 10x faster than a synth.
Consider loading suse or redhat linux and running Quartus/linux
(can dual boot win/linux if you like)

--Mike Treseler

DK wrote:

>Hi,
>
>could somebody suggest hi-performance workstation I can use to compile my
>designs in a fastest possible way?
>
>I use Altera Quartus III and EP1C12Q240 device. It 90% full with most of the
>memory used. My Athlon XP 1800+ on ASUS A7V266-C motherboard with 512M of
>RAM takes 8/23 minutes to compile/fit. I did try dual Xeon 2200 on TYAN MB
>and it did only 5% faster..
>
>Did somebody try Athlon 64-bit processor?
>
No, but we tried a 64 bit Opteron and found that a 3Ghz Xeon is about
30% faster than a 1.8G Opteron.

Steve

Followup to: <[email protected]>
By author: "DK" <[email protected]>
In newsgroup: comp.arch.fpga
>
> could somebody suggest hi-performance workstation I can use to compile my
> designs in a fastest possible way?
>
> I use Altera Quartus III and EP1C12Q240 device. It 90% full with most of the
> memory used. My Athlon XP 1800+ on ASUS A7V266-C motherboard with 512M of
> RAM takes 8/23 minutes to compile/fit. I did try dual Xeon 2200 on TYAN MB
> and it did only 5% faster..
>
> Did somebody try Athlon 64-bit processor?
>

You may want to get more and/or faster memory to begin with.

Both the recent 800 MHz FSB Pentium4's and the Opteron/Athlon64
on-chip memory controllers help in terms of memory bandwidth, too.

-hpa
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