Stupid question

give this a try

Ahh...Even if it runs, expect at least a 10 fold performance decrease on PAR (assuming that you have already upgraded the mini mac's pathetic

256MB RAM). Sadly it is already slow enough. With the time that you wasted waiting for PAR to finish, might as well spend some time installing a water-cool x86 box. Better yet, running the tools on an xbox (with linux) might even be faster

-jz

Hi Jason,

Hmmm... A Celery 733 is not exactly the preferred CPU for computing-intensive stuff like P&R. I can even imagine a G5 using VirtualPC running faster than that.

Best regards,

Ben

Try keeping your noisy PC elsewhere on a network and use Virtual Desktop under Virtual PC (eek!!!)

-Jim

Here is a solution for your noise,

The cost could not be the issue if you start using Altera devices :-)

Thomas Womack wrote:

that doesn't address the disk drive noise. 15000 rpm SCSI drives are pretty noisy.

--

--Ray Andraka, P.E. President, the Andraka Consulting Group, Inc.

401/884-7930 Fax 401/884-7950 email snipped-for-privacy@andraka.com

"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, 1759

Do you need a 15k rpm drive for this sort of work? If you're swapping you need more RAM, surely? The reading of files from the disk has not been a bottleneck in my experience, although I'm not targetting the very biggest devices out there...

My Barracuda is almost silent, even in standard mountings - its the PSU fan that annoys me now!

Cheers, Martin

--
martin.j.thompson@trw.com
TRW Conekt, Solihull, UK
http://www.trw.com/conekt

I did when I bought that system. file I/O was a bottleneck at the time, at least in simulation and PAR. I haven't evaluated it recently, but will be later this year when I upgrade systems once again.

--
--Ray Andraka, P.E.
President, the Andraka Consulting Group, Inc.
401/884-7930     Fax 401/884-7950
email ray@andraka.com  
http://www.andraka.com  

 "They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little 
  temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
                                          -Benjamin Franklin, 1759

This is probably both troll-bait and an FAQ, but what's the Altera equivalent of something like the Xess $199 XC3S1000 or $349 Avnet XC4VLX25? (that is, a cheap board with a chip on it as large as the free tools support, and some quick-win peripherals)

Counting LUTs, multipliers, memories and general performance claims, the LX25 board is a remarkable capability for the price of three weeks' rent.

Chip/Board cost/# LUTs/# flipflops/# multipliers | # 512bit/# 4kbit/# 16kbit/# 512kbit

XC4VLX25 $349 21504 21504 48 | 0 0 72 0 XC3S1000 $199 15360 15360 24 | 0 0 24 0 EP1C12 $295 12060 12060 0 | 0 52 0 0 EP2S15 12480 12480 48 | 104 78 0 0 EP1S10 $395 10570 10570 24 | 94 60 0 1

Parallax do a $395 bare-bones board with an EP1S10, and there's the Nios II Eval Board for $295 with Ethernet. I suppose the Stratix 2 series is new enough that it's unfair to expect cheap hobbyist boards already, but Google isn't giving me any useful hit on +EP2S15 +board.

Tom

Take your PC, put Linux on it, install the Linux Xilinx tools, put it in another room and then rlogin or ssh into it. The Mac will make a fine X server. You can do all of your work from the Mac while the PC is safely out of earshot.

:-)

Funny how a $399 device ends up on a $349 board. (Source: Avnet's Part Search) It might be better to look at device prices.

Karl.

Part

Howdy Karl,

Funny how you tried to take a pot shot rather than actually answering his question. He seemed to be genuinely interested in finding a comparable Altera based eval board.

As for that price: assuming for a second that the single piece price on the website is even accurate, I am sure that Avnet doesn't just buy one part at a time, from themselves no less, to build eval boards. Even the 100 piece price ($313) that they list contains a huge amount of Avnet markup. And that's even considering that ES (pre-production) parts tend to cost more than production parts.

I'm sure it would be the same situation for Stratix II.

Marc

Not if you want to run the EDK. On a Mac X display, drop-down menus appear at screen co-ords (0,0), and the 1st option is unselectable. Oh, and the EDK misbehaves when you get to the 'add peripherals' stage - you can never get past that screen.

Running using VNC from the linux box to the mac is better, but you still get lag and sometimes strange behaviour.

I've just bought a DVI KVM, so I can run the EDK on my Linux box with the output going to my gorgeous mac monitor - it's the only solution I can find that has no problems :-(

Oh, and a bog-standard 64-bit AMD box (2GHz) runs about 3x the speed of a dual 2GHz G5 box when running iverilog, so it'll be a *lot* faster than on a G4 Mac Mini. I love the form-factor of the mini, but a computing powerhouse it most certainly ain't. I'd say the AMD box would be ~10x the speed of the mini...

Simon.