So I asked Altera when they would release a version of Quartus that would support multi-threaded place and route (this takes the most time on the designs I have worked on) I also asked them about the best (fastest) PC to run quartus on. here's my questions followed by their answers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: at the end of year I am thinking of purchasing a new PC to do my quartus and EDA development on. I was wondering how the system requirements will change with the release of vista, and what the ideal system configuration for running fast synthesis and place and route will be. Right now I am having to wait between
15 minutes and two hours for various designs to compile. What system components will most contribute to faster place and route and synthesis (eg, more ram, more processors, faster ram, faster processors, 32 vs 64 bit architecture?, any specific CPU more highly rated then others?)A: Altera does not have recommendations for CPUs/Mother Board. About the choice for AMD or Intel processor, Altera does not have testcases to show one way or another.
However, the compile time is mostly related to CPU speed and physical memory size. For detailed information on memory requirements for compilation targeting different device architectures, please refer to the readme file by clicking Quartus II menu "Help -> Readme File".
If system memory is enough and Quartus II don't use hard disk as virtual memory, you could try to upgrade your CPU speed for good performance. However, if memory is not enough and hard disk virtual memory is frequently used, the compilation time will increase more. Therefore, I think we could firstly satisfy the physical memory requirement of Quartus II compilation and then try to upgrade CPU speed.
Multi processor system or multi-thread CPU will help you run other applications at the same time as running the Quartus II compile, but not necessarily will help with the compile time.
Quartus II can support 64 bit system. Generally, 64 bit Quartus II can run faster than 32 bit if memory is adequately large (> 2G). However, the performance upgrade is dependent on specific design project and we can't provide detailed benchmark.
64-bit Quartus II version 6.0 can be installed in UNIX Workstations (64-bit) (Solaris 8 and 9 only) or Linux Workstations (64-bit AMD64/EM64T processors) (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0/4.0 WS 64-bit for AMD64/EM64T only).------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: when will quartus be certified as being windows vista compatible, and is a 64 bit windows/vista version planned?
secondly, with the rise of multicore and multiprocessor systems, is work being done to parallelize the algorithms for synthesis and place and route in order to achieve speed benefits available through multiprocessor systems as they become the norm in the PC market.
A: I can't provide the exact schedule about Quartus II certification on Windows Vista. It's also due to the maturity of the OS. However, Altera software surely can support those operations systems if they are popular.
Our roadmap for Quartus II software also includes multi thread or multiprocessor system support. However, the release schedule is also not determined by now. But it might be no later than the end of next year. Thanks for your understanding.
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