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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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17 years ago

new intel processor - worth to upgrade?

Hi all, do you have anyone experience with the new i7 processor from intel? I want to upgrade my machine to get Quartus compile times little bit shorter. The i7 is pretty expensive, so I would like to know if it is worth it. Just now I have core 2 duo @ 3GHz, the i7 (affordable) has 2.66GHz, but I've heard that it is very strong at memory access and I think that memory operations are the main thing at compilation... Have you anyone tested it?

4 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    17 years ago

    The usage of cpu cores depends on your design.

    some fpga projects here use lots of fir and other stuffs but mostly quartus does not use more than 1 core on a EP2C70 FPGA that is nearly full ~80%.

    the most speedup comes from the cpu clock, thats why i have choosen the E8500 3.16GHz cpu with 2 cores instead of 4 cores.

    the cpu i had before was the D970 with 3.7GHz HT but the E8500 3.16GHz compiles exactly within half the time. today i would go for the E8600 as i do not see the improvement for quartus with an i7 cpu.

    The higher the cpu clock and faster the memory the shorter the compile times, that is my experience. 2 cpu cores are enough even if 2 projects are compiled the same time.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    17 years ago

    Core usage is reported in Compilation Report, Flow Elapsed Time. I get e.g. a 1.4 - 1.7 average usage during Fitter operation with a dual core. Thus providing two cores actually has some effect. A stronger effect would be by parallelization, either of different projects, or modules within a project, which requires writing batch commands. But it's true, that fast clock and fast memory (FSB speed) has the strongest impact.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    17 years ago

    Exactly.

    Some projects use more than 1 core but i have never seen a value of 2 or more if more than 2 cores available.

    as 2 cores is normal these days, then go for maximum clock speed you can get.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    17 years ago

    Yes, I know that Quartus does not get much from multi-cores CPUs. So I know that there can be a problem with lower frequency of i7 CPU. But it is a new generation of CPUs, couldn't there be same difference as there was with P4 and Core2? Moreover as you say, the compile speeds depends on memory speed and I've read some test (but only with some syntetic benchmarks) that the i7 handles memory pretty well, there was about twice increase in memory throughput... Isn't here anyone who actually tested it in Quartus? I want to be sure before I make an upgrade of my machine, because another possibility to upgrade will be only in some far future.