What PC should I buy to get the fastest compilation time for the Quartus II software?

Description

Altera only recommends minimum hardware requirements, minimum available physical RAM, and swap space for the Quartus® II software. These recommendations are in the readme.txt that ships with the Quartus II software and in the Device Support Release Notes, which are on the Quartus II Development Software documentation page

The minimum requirements allow the Quartus II software to run. If you have large designs and want optimum compilation times, Altera recommends a higher specification.

The Quartus II software requires significant processor and memory resources. CPU speed is the main factor that affects with compilation time performance. Consider multi-core processors and multi-CPU configurations to take advantage of multi-threaded compilation. Use design partitioning and incremental compilation to take full advantage of the available cores. Refer to the Reducing Compilation Time chapter in volume 2 of the Quartus II Handbook.

In addition, address the following three bottlenecks:

• Maximize on-chip cache access by the processor
• Minimize the usage of Virtual Memory
• Minimize hard disk access times

Maximize on-chip cache access by the processor

Choose a CPU(s) with a large amount of on-chip cache.

Minimize the usage of Virtual Memory

Use a 64-bit architecture and operating system, with adequate amounts of fast speed-grade RAM.

As device sizes, and software complexity increase so does memory usage. Designs targeting newer device families (Stratix® III and later) require more than the 2GB of RAM available to a 32-bit application, so use 64-bit operating systems and software.

For a 64-bit system, a single compilation should have access to at least 8 GB of RAM (8 to 10GB installed) and more for larger device families. For minimum installed RAM information per device, refer to the Device Support Release Notes, which are on the Quartus II Development Software documentation page.

Minimize hard disk access times

Install a local SCSI or SATA based architecture with fast or solid state disks. Disks can also be RAID striped for faster access.

Using network disks can be a significant bottle neck for compilation times. If you must store the project source on a network disk, Altera recommends that you create a local project that uses source files from the network file system, keeping the project directory local and the source files remote. The Quartus II software only reads the source files a few times, but it needs to access the Quartus II databases (db and incremental_db) many times.

Additional Notes

• Switching from 32-bit to 64-bit OS and software may not reduce compilation time. 64-bit Quartus II software allows access to a larger memory map per process (no 2-GB restriction), but you may not see improvements when using 64-bit OS or software, if your design does not reach the 2-GB limit and uses slow virtual memory on a 32-bit OS. You may see a slight degradation in compilation times because of the overhead for 64-bit processing.
• The compilation time performance of the Quartus II software version 10.0 and later 64-bit versus 32-bit (on a 64-bit machine) is comparable, as is the performance of the Windows OS versus the equivalent Linux (32-bit versus 32-bit, or 64-bit versus 64-bit).