Wow, I wish I had computers as powerful as yours. I've had a design synthesizing using Xilinx Foundation 5.1 for 178 CPU hours thus far on a Pentium 4 with 1.5 GBs RAM, and it's showing no signs of completing anytime soon. Looks like I need to upgrade to a dual Opteron with many gigs of RAM or something. Unfortunately those are *not* cheap.
Can anyone recommend a computer system configuration (h/w and s/w) specifically targeted at FPGA design and synthesis for under $5,000 or so? A Sun Sparc workstation used to be considered top of the line, but I'm not sure that's true anymore.
Apparently rendering graphics is still done by the X11 server on Linux. X11 was a cool thing 20 years ago when graphics workstations cost as much as a Ferrari. I don't know why this dinosaure (X11) still exists today.
I'm not sure that faster hardware would solve your compile time issue.
What part? What design flow?
Do you have excessive numbers of constraints? Watch out for, among other things, constraints with wildcards. Automatically generated constraints from third party synthesis tools can sometimes generate a huge number of constraints. Look for the .ncf file. To debug this, try running the design with just a period constraint on every clock. If this completes in reasonable time, add constraints until it no longer runs in reasonable time, and then look carefully at the constraint(s) that breaks it.
Before upgrading the hardware, have you considered upgrading the software? While the older software does some things better, run time and memory footprint have both gotten smaller. And it is fairly easy to have multiple versions on the same computer.
Is the design paging? If the computer is paging, CPU utilization will be small, under 10%, and the disks will be running all the time. If so, then adding 0.5 G of memory might do the trick. That is about the limit with standard Windows. Standard WinXP has a 2 GB limit (3 GB with some hacking), and WinXP 64 isn't supported.
As far as I know, all but the biggest parts should run with 2 GB or less.
If you have to buy new higher end hardware, I'd suggest thinking about an Athlon dual core system with 4 GB RAM and RedHat 64. Yes, it is only about twice what you currently have, but it should be 1/3 the price of a 8GB Opteron system.
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