Intel® Quartus® Prime Software
Intel® Quartus® Prime Design Software, Design Entry, Synthesis, Simulation, Verification, Timing Analysis, System Design (Platform Designer, formerly Qsys)

Quartus standard vs lite

Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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Hi! 

 

I have question about the quartus synthesis speed. 

 

I have been using quartus lite but as the projects grow the synthesis times start to be rather annoying. So I decided to buy the license for standard version as its supposed to use multiple cores. But as there is evaluation version available I decided yo give it a try to see how much faster the licensed version will be. 

 

But the lite and standard demo version both spend ~20 minutes for my test project. Lite version reports that it uses single core, as expected. But the standard evalutaion is reporting similar results. Synthesis and fitter both utilize only one core 100%, usage of the rest of the cores varies around 1% or so (checked parallel Compilation reports). So I did not see any benefit using standard version... 

 

And question: Is the quartus standard 30 days evaluation license supposed to use all the cores or is it limited to the single core as the lite version? And if its supposed to use all the cores, why it does not do so? 

 

BR, Madis 

 

Quartsus versions I compared: 

17.1 lite vs 17.1 standard (30 days evaluation mode) 

Test project targeting MAX10M50 

 

HW: 

i7-4600U CPU @ 2.10GHz
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
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Using multiple cores does not give a 2x,3x speed up - I think the best you can expect is about 30% speed up. Fitting is not very multi thread friendly. 

Where you do get the benefit is that it will generate the bitfile at the same time as timing analysis.
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