Actel Designer on multiple cores

[alb]

Hi everyone,

I had my vbox running with one core only (out of 4 on the host) and
Designer was running extremely slow, so I thought 'what the heck' I'm
not doing much with the other 3 cores on my host, so maybe I'll throw
another core to my vbox so that I can run Designer faster.

What a wishful thinking... designer_bin goes up to 50% only of my cpu
resources, clearly hinting that it does not know how to run on a
multicore system. Is this possible?

Is there anyway to bypass this problem?

Thanks a lot,

Al

--
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?

 

[Theo Markettos]

alb <al.basili@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok I can even add Synplify Pro to the list of tools which is running on
a single core as well.

Is this a common feature I did not happen to know? (I start to believe
so).

Pretty much. Quartus has had the ability to use multiple cores for years,
but until 13.x the average number of cores used was about 1.7. 13.x is a
lot better, but still it's primarily the fitter that may use of 4 or so
cores (on a 16 physical/32 hyperthread machine).

Once this happens Amdahl's law starts to bite: the parallel stage happens
quick(er), but the rest of the synthesis is now the bottleneck.

Theo

 

[alb]

Ok I can even add Synplify Pro to the list of tools which is running on
a single core as well.

Is this a common feature I did not happen to know? (I start to believe
so).

Al

alb <al.basili@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone,

I had my vbox running with one core only (out of 4 on the host) and
Designer was running extremely slow, so I thought 'what the heck' I'm
not doing much with the other 3 cores on my host, so maybe I'll throw
another core to my vbox so that I can run Designer faster.

What a wishful thinking... designer_bin goes up to 50% only of my cpu
resources, clearly hinting that it does not know how to run on a
multicore system. Is this possible?

Is there anyway to bypass this problem?

Thanks a lot,

Al

--
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?

 

On Monday, April 14, 2014 3:26:29 PM UTC+3, Theo Markettos wrote:

alb <al.basili@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok I can even add Synplify Pro to the list of tools which is running on
a single core as well.

Is this a common feature I did not happen to know? (I start to believe
so).

Pretty much. Quartus has had the ability to use multiple cores for years,
but until 13.x the average number of cores used was about 1.7. 13.x is a
lot better, but still it's primarily the fitter that may use of 4 or so
cores (on a 16 physical/32 hyperthread machine).

I didn't measure exactly, but my impression was that Quartus 13.1 fitter running on 4 cores gets the job done approximately 1.5 faster than when running on a single core. Nice speed-up, but hardly a game changer.
May be that's because the machine in question is rather old Nehalem-based i7-920. Relatively to newer Intel cores, Nehalem is severely constrained by L3 cache bandwidth.

Once this happens Amdahl's law starts to bite: the parallel stage happens
quick(er), but the rest of the synthesis is now the bottleneck.

Theo

I am especially annoyed by slowness of Altera assembler and Timequest timing analyzer. Because this comparatively (to fitter) simple tools do not have to be slow.