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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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14 years ago

Recommendations for fast PC

Quartus obviously needs some decent PC horsepower and my current PC is taking 20 minutes for a complete compile and fit cycle. I've fitted the maximum 4GB of RAM but I'm not using all of it and the page fault rate is low. I'm looking to buy a faster PC, but I'm completely out of touch. Can anyone suggest what I should be looking for in a new PC, e.g.

Core i3, i5, i7 or something from AMD?

How many cores?

Raw clock rate?

Max memory?

21 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    From experience, large number of cores and extra ram do not provide significant speed ups in compilation time yet. It is mostly down to the design.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    Just to quantify, We have a Core 2 Duo machine with 3GB of ram and a server machine with 8 Xeon Cores and 12GB of ram, compilation is only about 20% faster on the Server - the main point is the Ram (sometimes it will run out on the core 2 duo machine).

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    Most of the compilation process is run on a single CPU-core (if you use the Web-edition the complete compilation process). So the Ideal machine only needs two cores: one at 10Ghz to run the Quartus II processes and the other at 1 GHz or so to do the OS work. A SSD hard drive will speed up the IO operations. And the more memory the less page swaps. A big data cache will help too.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    - multicore : will not help with WEB Edition but OS is more responsive.

    - proc with big cache (as Josyb said). Intel or AMD ? No idea.

    - RAM : I think qdr (quadruple data rate)-DRAM correctly used in windows will help

    - fast hard drive

    - NO RAM optimization software, NO Process Explorer, NO watch youtube flash movie ;-)

    - as Tricky said, "It is mostly down to the design."

    - In Quartus Menu, there is "Compilation Time Advisor":D

    Has anyone tried to run quartus 32bits in windows 64 bits (with of course 64 bits architecture) ? Any improvements ?
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    I take it that the "use all processors" check box does nothing in the web edition. I've got an SSD, but with enough RAM I'm not getting much disk traffic anyway.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    With today's technology I would recommend an Intel machine with enough memory that is recommended for compiling your design. I use a six core i7 machine at home clocked at 4.3GHz with a RAID 0 array of SSDs and it compiles really quickly but not all that stuff really helps much.

    When Quartus accesses the /db directory the SSDs helps but most of the time Quartus is accessing memory. Most of my speedup comes from the fact that my machine is overclocked and that it has a lot of memory bandwidth between the cache and DDR3 SDRAM. Sometimes I compile multiple designs at the same time and that's where the many cores and SSD help. Also I run with 12GB of RAM so I turn off the swap file when it's running Windows.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    If you have at least 8gb ram, in Win7x64, disable the OS's virtual memory page file. HD access appears drop considerably. Also, go with a 4x SSD hd stripe raid. As for ram, look into high performance gaming grade ram modules.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    So it's all old school stuff, maximum GHz, high bandwidth RAM, and enough of it.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    In general yes that will give the most performance. If you overclock your machine up the ying-yang like I do make sure it's stable before trying to compile designs on it :)