Hi all,
I am buying a new for my work. I do a lot of synhesis, map and P&R using ISE 8.2 (Windows) in Xilinx EDK with quite complex systems. Building a HW for such a system can take a very long time, so selection of an appropriate computer is a must.
Does anyone has any experience or benchmark test for a computer selection:
- single or dual core processor
- AMD or Intel
- processor core type
Cheers,
Guru
AMD for optimal MIPS/cost.
- OS
I suspect ISE runs more efficient on FreeBSD (Linux emulation) than under MS-win32. Esp considering the posting some days ago where it was found that when memory resources are tight MS-win32 gets a significant performance drop. (infact it works to run ISE with a PII-200MHz/80MB machine with simple constructions for XC3S200 with .bit in minutes).
- Memory
Can't ever have too much.. ;)
It would be interesting too see what kind of computation resources ISE benefits most from. Ie L1/L2 cache, branchprediction, FSB-speed, etc..
My experience says "get the biggest cache you can", which seems to be Intel these days...
Cheers, Martin
-- martin.j.thompson@trw.com TRW Conekt - Consultancy in Engineering, Knowledge and Technology http://www.conekt.net/electronics.html
this question pops up every few months ...
- Most important is the CPU cache (so Intel Core 2 Duo with 4M should give some speedup)
- second factor is memory size - if ISE and your OS run out of memory then swapping will last forever (2 GBytes is not too much)
I ordered a machine like this 2 weeks ago but it has not yet arrived look at message id 45124c6e$ snipped-for-privacy@news.fhg.de and follow ups
... multi-core does not yet give you anything for ISE
bye, Michael
get a big whack (4 Gbytes or more) of PC6400 ECC DDR2 memory. ECC is important, because without, you won't be able to detect memory errors, which can cause weird PAR problems.
John
It doesn't appear to be quite that simple. Frequency does matter. Case in point, my 2.2 GHz 0.5 MiB L2$ Athlon beats my 2.0 GHz 1 MiB by more than 10% on Synthesis and P&R, though the former also have dual channel memory.
That said, I'm getting a Core 2 Duo tomorrow for the 4 MiB L2$ and other improvements. The extra core is completely irrelevent here, but doesn't hurt. I'll be sure to post a comparison between the three architectures.
I disagree about the value of ECC. If you have memory issues, they are exceedingly unlikely to be silent errors (more likely a crash). Besides, if you're truly anal, compile twice for production and compare both. The same error won't happy twice.
Tommy
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