Perfect workstation for FPGA synthesis

Hi,

synthesis tool such as Quartus is using several algorithms including optimization. That's why synthesis process have a lot operations. In my work (~480k L) I used 64GB RAM and it was good enough. However I would recommend start from 64GB and run compilation process containing 600k L to see memory utilization in your system. If it exceeds more than 48GB I would add more resources for ex. +32GB and check again.

Number of cores in CPU have impact on efficiency, under very important condition: optimization algorithms must be parallelized. Not every algorithm is feasible to be parallelized. Again, in my practice, even if I allowed to use all cores in CPU (i9 extreme with 32 logical cores) only 4 of them were utilized 100%, sometimes another 4 were utilized during some specific phase. So 8 were utilized during whole computing process. Because this is the system 12 logical cores should be enough.

I also observed that frequency had significant impact on compilation time.

Concluding, based on my experience I achieved the best time to build Quartus project if I used fewer cores (8) but more efficient CPU (cache, frequency, the newest architecture) with more RAM with reasonable time access.

NVMe memory or storage have less impact on compilation time than CPU/memory. Storage I/O transactions are limited during processing/optimization.

Rafal