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Altera_Forum
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21 years ago

Quartus II Compiler Speed?

I am re-compiling nios II "Full Featured" reference design for Altera C12 Ev. Kit on a Dell 2.4GHz P4 CPU. It took 40 min. with only 40% done. Is this normal? Thanks
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Altera_Forum
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21 years ago

Yikes! 128MB. That is definately why. Quartus place & route is very processor/memory intensive. It gets progressively worse as you push your design clock speed requirements up and start to fill the chip with logic. The actual place & route operation is too deep for my understanding, but from what I understand Altera employs many talented engineers to get the most out of this.

Here is an excerpt of system requirements from the Quartus readme file: 

Installation & Operating Requirements
=====================================
Altera recommends the following system configuration:
*  Pentium II 400 with 512-MB system memory (faster systems give
   better software performance)

My desktop here at work has 1GB RAM and it is adequate... heck my home PC uses more RAM when I am doing photoshop work on my digital camera photos.