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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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Hi,
in order to show my experience with multi-processor support I ran a small benchmark with
one large StratixIV design:
All available CPU's allowed:
Analysis & Synthesis
00:31:15 3.3 2413 MB
Partition Merge 00:02:03 1.0 1356 MB
Fitter
02:04:15 3.1 3746 MB
TimeQuest 00:14:28 1.5 2678 MB
Assembler 00:06:40 1.0 1933 MB
02:58:41
Only 1 CPU allowed
Analysis & Synthesis
01:03:35 1.0 2401 MB
Partition Merge 00:02:12 1.0 1053 MB
Fitter
02:40:47 1.0 3618 MB
TimeQuest 00:15:34 1.0 1934 MB
Assembler 00:05:58 1.0 1934 MB
04:08:06
Kind regards
GPK
Honored Contributor
