Intel® Quartus® Prime Software
Intel® Quartus® Prime Design Software, Design Entry, Synthesis, Simulation, Verification, Timing Analysis, System Design (Platform Designer, formerly Qsys)
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17268 Discussions

Improve Quartus II Compilation time (hardware)

Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
1,459 Views

Hello my design is taking a long time to compile and i need to improve it. 

 

My computer is an i5 with 4gigs of ram. 

I am thinking about buying a computer with two xeon processors, will it decrease my compilation time? Currently is taking me 4 hours to finish a compilation; 

 

Can Quartus II handle well more then one processor?
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
587 Views

Do you have enabled Smart Compilation? Quartus 12 is more fast..

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
587 Views

anyone? I am waiting to buy a new hardware based on the responses

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
587 Views

To use more then one processor you have to buy subscription edition

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
587 Views

i have the subscription edition.

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
587 Views

Unless things have changed in 12, Quartus uses only one processor when real work is being done (fitting for example). I have 6 cores and only one of them gets heavily used. So, buy the fastest processor you can get with the most cache. A lot or RAM does not hurt either. 

 

I assume that dividing the fitting process into multiple threads is still an illusive problem for Altera (and others).
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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor II
587 Views

We've seen the greatest improvement in build time by moving to the fastest memory you can afford. 

 

We ran several benchmarks builds using a core i7 2600 overclocked to 4.1GHz and several different standard memory modules (PC3-10600, PC3-12800, PC3-14900). 

 

Overclocking the CPU made a marginal improvement on the build time. Overclocking the memory also improved the build time. 

 

By going from a standard core i7 2600 at 3.4GHz with PC3-10600 to overclocking the core i7 to 4.1GHz and swapping out the memory for PC3-14900 (also slightly overclocked), we took our 218 minute build down to around 73 minutes.  

 

On a side note, running the build in command line mode also improves the build time.
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