Why is StratixIVGX device's compilation time so long?

[Altera_Forum]

Device: EP4SGX180 

Software: QuartusII 11.1 + sp2 Resource uage: about 60%  The compiling time is more than 1 hour, why?

[Altera_Forum]

Because Your computer is slow.

[Altera_Forum]

Because 

 1. Statix 4s are rather large?   We had an arria 2 GX take longer on a Xeon machine with 12 cores and 12GB of ram.

[Altera_Forum]

For a M4 Stratix V, 30% logic and 75% RAM used, compilation time is about 2h30 on a core i5. Altera documentation indicates 12 Go of RAM recommended. I upgraded RAM from 4 to 10 Go but the result was the same (hard drive access during fitter). Last upgrade to 14 Go does not change anything !!  

I don't consider my PC slow as well. Many softwares are able to process kindly with parallel CPUs but Quartus doesn't and that's the real issue (I don't know performances of other FPGAs vendors, but I guess it' identical). Got now to optimize to use incremental and rapid features.

[Altera_Forum]

I don't think my computer is slow. When altera release new device or new QII version, they always claim that performance enhance and compilation time decrease. It seems that's not the truth. 

 I have used ArriaGX(EP1AGX60), which size is 1/3 of EP4SGX180. But its compilation time is only about 10 minutes when using old QII version.  So i think that EP4SGX180's compilation time should be about half an hour. Though there are other resource increasing, RAM, muliplier..., but Altera claim the new QII version can decrease the compilation time. So 30 minutes should be reasonable.

[Altera_Forum]

I really dont think you can estimate how long it should take because there are many factors like resource usage, routing usage, timing requirements etc that can really affect how long a compilation takes. 

 From what pantxoa says, maybe look at getting more CPU cores, more ram and an SSD.

[Altera_Forum]

I'm sure there are a ton of different factors that contribute to the build time, but we found that the biggest impact on improving build time was getting a build box with the latest corei7 with the fasted supported RAM and overclocking it. That brought our SIV GX builds down from around 2.5 hours to just over an hour. 

 EDIT: Should have mentioned that we run linux on the build box and executing the builds from the command line also improves the build time.  We also noticed that the Scaler I has an extraordinarily long build time relative to Scaler II.

[Altera_Forum]

Ok, thanks you guys all. It's helpful for me to analyze my system.