Portable computer for FPGA/CPLD tools

[javid]

Hello,

I would like to know if someone have evaluated the performance with
FPGA software tools of the new Intel Centrino Processors compared with
the Intel Mobile Pentium 4. I would like to buy a portable and I don't
know which processor is better (more performance for EDA Tools). I
would appreciate any recommendation on Processors and Portable
Manufacturers.

Thanks a lot and best regards,

Javi

 

[Amontec Team, Laurent Gau]

Hi Javi,

The memory RAM and RAM managment will be more important feature for your
next portable computer.

Make sure your DDRAM is not shared with Video Card !!!

Make sure to have a minimum 512MB DDRAM.

FOR synth and Place and Route the RAM is very important.

Regards,
Laurent Gauch
_________________________
www.amontec.com
Provides new low cost JTAG Solution (for Xilinx, Altera, All ARM
processors, PPC, coldfire, ...)

javid wrote:

Hello,

I would like to know if someone have evaluated the performance with
FPGA software tools of the new Intel Centrino Processors compared with
the Intel Mobile Pentium 4. I would like to buy a portable and I don't
know which processor is better (more performance for EDA Tools). I
would appreciate any recommendation on Processors and Portable
Manufacturers.

Thanks a lot and best regards,

Javi

 

[Yves Deweerdt]

javid wrote:

Hello,

I would like to know if someone have evaluated the performance with
FPGA software tools of the new Intel Centrino Processors compared with
the Intel Mobile Pentium 4. I would like to buy a portable and I don't
know which processor is better (more performance for EDA Tools). I
would appreciate any recommendation on Processors and Portable
Manufacturers.

Thanks a lot and best regards,

Javi

Hello Javid,

I recently bought a new laptop, centrino 1.5GHz, 512MB DDR and it works
great with the Xilinx Webpack 5.2. I notice some performance difference
with my desktop pc (P4 2.8GHz, 768MB DDR) but nothing to worry about,
for me at least, since I only do designs for the Spartan IIe 200k on it ;-)

As synthesis and route and place algorithms coonsume a lot of memory, I
think that would be your major concern, depending on the designs you do,
you may be better of with a centrino and 1024MB RAM than with a P4
3.06GHz with only 512MB...

Kind regards,

Yves

 

[Vinh Pham]

The memory RAM and RAM managment will be more important feature for your
next portable computer.

I agree with Laurent, RAM will be a major issue if you have large designs
and you plan to do place & route on your latop. I'm not sure what size
design you're planning to develop on your portable, but for our large
Virtex/Virtex2 designs we loaded our desktops with 1GB of RAM. It was a bit
of overkill and 512 MB would probably have been just right. The key thing
to remember is if your place & route software has to use virtual memory, buy
more RAM.

Make sure your DDRAM is not shared with Video Card !!!

Yeah a lot of laptop have good specs, but poor design. Watch out for things
that will cause a memory bottle neck. Unfortunately I don't have much in
the way of guidelines for you. Just remember that the system design is just
as important as the speed of the CPU and the ammount of RAM.

Theoretically speaking, the memory system on laptops might be such a
bottleneck in laptops that the speed of the CPU might not be as critical.
But I have no experience or evidence of this, so take it with a grain of
salt. Just something to think about.

Regards,
Vinh