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For the Analysis,Synthesis, Fitter and Timing Analysis Quartus offers a ( in my point of view) very good Multi-Processor Support ( in average up to 3 - 4) .
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My experience has been that the multi-processor support of Quartus is useless. Whenever I have enabled it, it does not seem to use my extra cores any substantial amount. And then to top it off, when I timed a complete compile, it ended up taking the same amount of time even though it used more processor resources.
I keep thinking that the effectiveness of the multi-processor support must depend heavily on the design being compiled, otherwise Altera should be embarrassed to advertise it as a feature. I have only ever tried it with relatively small designs that only take 5 - 10 minutes to compile.
I agree with mmTsuchi, I think having the fastest memory and cache possible is a big benefit. From my experience with the designs I have worked with, this is more important than extra processor cores.
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