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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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16 years ago

Suggestion for new workstation

Hi,

we're using you sw Quartus (we'll upgrade to 9.1 soon) and we have to renew the pc workstation on which the sw runs (a Dell T5500)

Can you help me to decide some configuration ? eg.

1) the first doubt is if the software runs better on a dual processor config or on a single processor but more "clocked";

with about the same money I can choose for example for a Xeon Quad Core @2,66Ghz-1,333Mhz (X5550) o for a Dual Xeon @2,2Ghz-1,066Mhz (E5520)

Can the sw parallelize on all the 8 cores ?

2) I can choose between 1,066Mhz o 1,333Mhz for bus speed; in the latter case I will have only 6 Gb ram (because the new simm cost more) instead 8 or 12... again: better more slowly ram or few speedy ?

3) Is Disk speed important ? maybe better to mount 2 disk in striping (raid0) mode ?

4) I will mount Win7 64 bit : do you know some issue ?

Thanks a lot and best regards

Sandro

1 Reply

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    16 years ago

    the quartus software uses more than 1 cpu core but for the over all performance go for more clock speed than for more cores. 2 cores at a higher clock rate will run quartus faster than 4 cores at a slower clock rate.

    it might help in some cases to have more than 2 cores, but i can run 2 projects at the same time both performing a full compile and the dell presicion T3400 here with E8500 cpu let me work beside the compile with office tools

    my opinion, go for more cpu clock speed with 2 cores and use faster memory, 4GB here are enough for cyclone devices.