Recommendations for fast PC

[Altera_Forum]

Quartus obviously needs some decent PC horsepower and my current PC is taking 20 minutes for a complete compile and fit cycle. I've fitted the maximum 4GB of RAM but I'm not using all of it and the page fault rate is low. I'm looking to buy a faster PC, but I'm completely out of touch. Can anyone suggest what I should be looking for in a new PC, e.g. 

Core i3, i5, i7 or something from AMD? How many cores? Raw clock rate? Max memory?

[Altera_Forum]

From experience, large number of cores and extra ram do not provide significant speed ups in compilation time yet. It is mostly down to the design.

[Altera_Forum]

Just to quantify, We have a Core 2 Duo machine with 3GB of ram and a server machine with 8 Xeon Cores and 12GB of ram, compilation is only about 20% faster on the Server - the main point is the Ram (sometimes it will run out on the core 2 duo machine).

[Altera_Forum]

So does a high CPU clock rate help?

[Altera_Forum]

Most of the compilation process is run on a single CPU-core (if you use the Web-edition the complete compilation process). So the Ideal machine only needs two cores: one at 10Ghz to run the Quartus II processes and the other at 1 GHz or so to do the OS work. A SSD hard drive will speed up the IO operations. And the more memory the less page swaps. A big data cache will help too.

[Altera_Forum]

- multicore : will not help with WEB Edition but OS is more responsive. 

- proc with big cache (as Josyb said). Intel or AMD ? No idea. - RAM : I think qdr (quadruple data rate)-DRAM correctly used in windows will help - fast hard drive - NO RAM optimization software, NO Process Explorer, NO watch youtube flash movie ;-) - as Tricky said, "It is mostly down to the design."  - In Quartus Menu, there is "Compilation Time Advisor":D   Has anyone tried to run quartus 32bits in windows 64 bits (with of course 64 bits architecture) ? Any improvements ?

[Altera_Forum]

I take it that the "use all processors" check box does nothing in the web edition. I've got an SSD, but with enough RAM I'm not getting much disk traffic anyway.

[Altera_Forum]

With today's technology I would recommend an Intel machine with enough memory that is recommended for compiling your design. I use a six core i7 machine at home clocked at 4.3GHz with a RAID 0 array of SSDs and it compiles really quickly but not all that stuff really helps much. 

 When Quartus accesses the /db directory the SSDs helps but most of the time Quartus is accessing memory. Most of my speedup comes from the fact that my machine is overclocked and that it has a lot of memory bandwidth between the cache and DDR3 SDRAM. Sometimes I compile multiple designs at the same time and that's where the many cores and SSD help. Also I run with 12GB of RAM so I turn off the swap file when it's running Windows.

[Altera_Forum]

If you have at least 8gb ram, in Win7x64, disable the OS's virtual memory page file. HD access appears drop considerably. Also, go with a 4x SSD hd stripe raid. As for ram, look into high performance gaming grade ram modules.

[Altera_Forum]

So it's all old school stuff, maximum GHz, high bandwidth RAM, and enough of it.

[Altera_Forum]

In general yes that will give the most performance. If you overclock your machine up the ying-yang like I do make sure it's stable before trying to compile designs on it :)

[Altera_Forum]

--- Quote Start ---  In general yes that will give the most performance. If you overclock your machine up the ying-yang like I do make sure it's stable before trying to compile designs on it :)  --- Quote End ---     !!! Make sure your heat sinks & fans are free of dust. Long compiles in Quartus can really heat things up. For me, I went with this 50$ gaming mid-tower case: IN WIN Griffin Black ATX Gaming Case (Google it for photos & vendors.) The 1 huge fan on the case is really effective.

[Altera_Forum]

I'm not a proponent of overclocking. PCs give me enough headaches with stable hardware....

[Altera_Forum]

--- Quote Start ---  I'm not a proponent of overclocking. PCs give me enough headaches with stable hardware....  --- Quote End ---     Ok, here is the poor mans way to shorten compile time: 1. Use Q2 9.1sp2, or, Q11 32 bit. (Q10 64 bit is slower) 2. Run your prototype project at a lower frequency & higher speed grade & gate count FPGA with these settings in Q2:  Physical Synthesis Optimizations -> all off (affects the fitter compile time)  Analysis & Synthesis Settings -> disable Timing Driven Synthesis.  More Analysis & Synthesis Settings / Synthesis Effort -> Fast (affects analysis & synthesis time, If your project uses a huge number of logic cells as memory arrays and your Fmax is really bad, keep this in auto)  Fitter Settings / Fast fit. Fitter Settings / placement effort & Router effort -> 0.25  Fitter Settings / Router timing optimization level -> Minimum  Fitter Settings / SSN optimizations -> off   If you are using logic cells as memory arrays, this also slows down compilation by a considerable amount.   Note on my current project, filling 50% of an EP3C55, I went from 10 minutes to 7 minutes with these settings. After overclocking only my PC's ram modules & disabling Windows's virtual file, the 7 minutes went down to 4 minutes. Also note that overclocking your CPU or bus speed has very little effect.

[Altera_Forum]

--- Quote Start ---  !!! Make sure your heat sinks & fans are free of dust. Long compiles in Quartus can really heat things up. For me, I went with this 50$ gaming mid-tower case: IN WIN Griffin Black ATX Gaming Case (Google it for photos & vendors.) The 1 huge fan on the case is really effective.  --- Quote End ---    Fan filters help a lot to help keep the dust out. My machine is liquid cooled so dust bunnies don't scare me :)

[Altera_Forum]

--- Quote Start ---   - RAM : I think qdr (quadruple data rate)-DRAM correctly used in windows will help  --- Quote End ---  I have never seen a PC with QDR RAM. A quick Google search didn't reveal anything either. Do you know any examples you could post links to?  As others have stated in this thread, my experience has been that memory bandwidth is one of the most important things to improve compile times in Quartus. It seems that QDR RAM could make a big difference here.  Some other observations I have made:  

• The 32bit version of Quartus is generally faster than the 64 bit version. I assume this is due to the extra memory bandwidth required for the larger memory pointers required for 64 bit. 
• Enabling multicore in Quartus does not always speed up the process and can in some cases even slow it down. (When compiling C code such as for Nios on the other hand, multicore makes a huge difference.) 

[Altera_Forum]

Additional poor-man's method compile speedup trick: 

 Use 'Classic timing analyser' in Q91sp2. The fitter will run about 50% faster & might give you a better Fmax depending on your design.

[Altera_Forum]

It's interesting that Quartus 32 bit is regarded as faster than Quartus 64 bit. 

 As memory bandwidth and clock speed seem to be the key hardware specs, the i7-2600K seems to be top trumps. It's rated at 3.8GHz (boost, but I assume it can run continuously with enough cooling) and supports DDR3-1066/1333 memory. It also supports something called intel® fast memory access (http://www.intel.com/en_uk/consumer/products/processors/specifications.htm?proc=52214#fastmemorytechnology)

[Altera_Forum]

Moreover, big internal cpu cache will greatly help in calculus. This cache is a very fast memory.

[Altera_Forum]

Well I've just compared Quartus 32 bit with Quartus 64 bit. The full cycle took 24:35 in 32 bit and 24:49 in 64 bit. That's 1% difference.

[Altera_Forum]

--- Quote Start ---  I have never seen a PC with QDR RAM. A quick Google search didn't reveal anything either. Do you know any examples you could post links to?  As others have stated in this thread, my experience has been that memory bandwidth is one of the most important things to improve compile times in Quartus. It seems that QDR RAM could make a big difference here. [...]   --- Quote End ---    Sorry for inconvenience. I saw quad data rate memory but it is for static ram only. src : http://www.qdrconsortium.org/