Has anyone recently done any benchmarking of
Windows PC's for Xilinx
ISE Compiles?

Is ISE multithreaded?
Can it use multiple processors (or cores)?
Do big CPU caches help?

Regards
Marc
P4-3GHz HT  2GB DDR2-533 RAM

marc_ely wrote:
> Has anyone recently done any benchmarking of Windows PC's for Xilinx
> ISE Compiles?
>
> Is ISE multithreaded?
> Can it use multiple processors (or cores)?
> Do big CPU caches help?
>
> Regards
> Marc
> P4-3GHz HT  2GB DDR2-533 RAM

I'm not sure if QuartusII or ISE is multithreaded but the first
generation dual core systems I wasn't impressed with. My experience is
my company provided me with a dual core system to do development work
with.

When my system wasn't living up to my expectations I did a little
research. The MS Windows performance meter and some third party tools
showed little activity. When it did it was about 85% or better,
occasionally pegged. I did some other poking around on my system and
discovered that they cheaped out with the graphics card and hard
drives.

My advice to you and this is partly experience and the other part gut
feeling is compare the price difference between the Extreme and Dual
Core chips if the price is negligible look for the one with faster
front side bus (FSB) speed. And, the second item I'd look into is a
caching SATA controller that supports mirror and some really fast hard
drives. Avoid striping the drives there is a performance hit but try
mirroring. From my observations, development tools I use are mostly
memory and hard drive bound. When you compile and PAR your design a
fast CPU is beneficial but it is also working with a lot supporting
files and storing/retrieving information from memory.

In the past most users report the biggest benefits from more and faster
memory.

Derek

Marc, why didn't you try to google for the
answer? This question is
asked every other week on comp.arch.fpga. I only reply because I have
some new numbers.

marc_ely wrote:
> Has anyone recently done any benchmarking of Windows PC's for Xilinx
> ISE Compiles?

No, but I have for Quartus which is very similar.

> Is ISE multithreaded?

No and not for a while to come.

> Can it use multiple processors (or cores)?

Nope.

> Do big CPU caches help?

Oh yeah, but once you have that, core frequency is all that matters.

I recently went from an Athlon 64 2.0 GHz/1 MiB L2$ to a E6600 Core 2
Duo 2.4 GHz/4 MiB L2$. For my benchmark, the time for Synth/P&R went
from 12m34/33m40 to ~6m/~15m, thus more then double the P&R
performance. When overclocked to 3.3 GHz the result scaled to
5m54/11m12, thus 3X the P&R performance. Other experiments confirm that
it scales linearly with frequency (assuming memory scales equally).

I have expensive memory, but from my experiments the benchmark results
showed very little sensitivity to memory bandwidth and latency.

The 4 MiB Core 2 Duo is a very fast chip for FPGA work, probably the
fastest x86 available, but it's still not fast enough to reduce the
compilation times to an acceptable level.

Tommy

Hi Tommy

Thanks for the info.  Yes I found your posts about 2mins after I sent
one out (after searching and finding nothing current).  That's the
problem with info on the web... it's often out of date and finding the
right stuff can be needle in haystack.

I think I will go for a CoreDuo with 4MB.

Marc

> Marc, why didn't you try to google for the answer? This question is
> asked every other week on comp.arch.fpga. I only reply because I have
> some new numbers.
>
> marc_ely wrote:
> > Has anyone recently done any benchmarking of Windows PC's for Xilinx
> > ISE Compiles?
>
> No, but I have for Quartus which is very similar.
>
> > Is ISE multithreaded?
>
> No and not for a while to come.
>
> > Can it use multiple processors (or cores)?
>
> Nope.
>
> > Do big CPU caches help?
>
> Oh yeah, but once you have that, core frequency is all that matters.
>
> I recently went from an Athlon 64 2.0 GHz/1 MiB L2$ to a E6600 Core 2
> Duo 2.4 GHz/4 MiB L2$. For my benchmark, the time for Synth/P&R went
> from 12m34/33m40 to ~6m/~15m, thus more then double the P&R
> performance. When overclocked to 3.3 GHz the result scaled to
> 5m54/11m12, thus 3X the P&R performance. Other experiments confirm that
> it scales linearly with frequency (assuming memory scales equally).
>
> I have expensive memory, but from my experiments the benchmark results
> showed very little sensitivity to memory bandwidth and latency.
>
> The 4 MiB Core 2 Duo is a very fast chip for FPGA work, probably the
> fastest x86 available, but it's still not fast enough to reduce the
> compilation times to an acceptable level.
> 
> Tommy

On 19 Oct 2006 09:19:03 -0700, "Tommy
Thorn" <t...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>I recently went from an Athlon 64 2.0 GHz/1 MiB L2$ to a E6600 Core 2
>Duo 2.4 GHz/4 MiB L2$. For my benchmark, the time for Synth/P&R went
>from 12m34/33m40 to ~6m/~15m, thus more then double the P&R
>performance. When overclocked to 3.3 GHz the result scaled to
>5m54/11m12, thus 3X the P&R performance. 

Could you give us some info on what the disk subsystems  look like for
each machine? (ide, sata what speed, any raid? etc)

> Other experiments confirm that
>it scales linearly with frequency (assuming memory scales equally).

What do you think explains for no change in synthesis for C2D change
from 2.4GHz to 3.3GHz ?

mk wrote:
> Could you give us some info on what the disk subsystems  look like for
> each machine? (ide, sata what speed, any raid? etc)

I could, but it would misleading as it's completely irrelevent to the
posted numbers. The benchmark is operating almost exclusively out of
the buffer cache and even then it's not reading that much data.

That said, for everything else disk latency matters a lot, so I used a
single SATA 150 GB Raptor (15,000 RPM) in the new box. The old box had
a quiet average speed Samsung PATA drive (7,200 RPM).

> What do you think explains for no change in synthesis for C2D change
> from 2.4GHz to 3.3GHz ?

My measurements were too informal. There is a change, just not as
substantial. I'd need to study this closer to understand what's going
on.

Tommy

My system has arrived and I did a quick
benchmark:

my lab-system: P4, 2.6 GHz, 2GBytes RAM
another system: P4, 3 GHz, 2GBytes RAM
my new machine: Core 2 Duo, E6700, 2GBytes RAM
with Asus P5LD2 Deluxe


a full run with ISE 6.3 (from synthesize to bitgen)
with a recent design takes:

my lab-system: 30 minutes
another system: 28 minutes
my new machine: 14 minutes


I would say it is worth the money and I guess we'll
buy some more of those machines ...


bye,
Michael

I took the plunge and built up a 2nd PC using a
Core2Duo.

Here are the specs:
Old PC: P4 3GHz HT, 2GB DDR2-533 RAM, Gigabyte GA81915 mobo, stock
cooler
New PC: Core2Duo E6600, 2GB DDR2-800 RAM, ASUS P5B Mobo, ArcticFreezer7
cooler

Using a Spartan3 design running clean from scratch in ISE 8.2.3i
Old PC: 82mins
New PC: 35mins
New PC (overclocked to 3.2GHz):  25mins

I'm really pleased with the Core2Duo and would recommend it.

Marc

marc_ely wrote:
> Has anyone recently done any benchmarking of Windows PC's for Xilinx
> ISE Compiles?
>
> Is ISE multithreaded?
> Can it use multiple processors (or cores)?
> Do big CPU caches help?
>
> Regards
> Marc
> P4-3GHz HT  2GB DDR2-533 RAM

While the CoreDuo looks the thing right now, on the disk side I'd be
interested to know if the new IDE Flash drives that go up to 32GB are
any use as a replacement for high RPM drives.

The only reviews I have seen (Toms IIRC) obviously have much lower
latency but not yet much throughput around 30MBytes/sec but at least
the ms delays should now be us delays. At this stage I wouldn't be
concerned about wearout as I expect these things to be get replaced
sooner or later, prices seem to be falling on Flash much faster than
DRAM now and the throughput is bound to reach closer to PATA max rates.

just a thought
John Jakson

marc_ely <m...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>I took the plunge and built up a 2nd PC using a Core2Duo.

>Here are the specs:
>Old PC: P4 3GHz HT, 2GB DDR2-533 RAM, Gigabyte GA81915 mobo, stock
>cooler
>New PC: Core2Duo E6600, 2GB DDR2-800 RAM, ASUS P5B Mobo, ArcticFreezer7
>cooler

>Using a Spartan3 design running clean from scratch in ISE 8.2.3i
>Old PC: 82mins
>New PC: 35mins
>New PC (overclocked to 3.2GHz):  25mins

>I'm really pleased with the Core2Duo and would recommend it.

Conclusion dual cores (multiprocessor) benefits Xilinx ISE substantially?