Spice Accelerator Hardware?

Douglas Mota · Dec 31, 2005

Dear Friends,
I'm very new in using Spice. Is there any accelerator hardware that
speeds up the simulation of circuits?

Best Regards!

Robert · Dec 31, 2005

"Douglas Mota" <douglasm@uninet.com.br> wrote in message
news:1135999288.512558.279370@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

Dear Friends,
I'm very new in using Spice. Is there any accelerator hardware that
speeds up the simulation of circuits?

Best Regards!

These people claim they've licked the partitioning of a Spice Simulation up
into multiple processors running multiple copies of your own Spice
Simulators. They claim a nearly linear increase in speed by adding more
processors.

http://www.xoomsys.com/

Wouldn't know.

Robert

Leon · Dec 31, 2005

Many years ago, Inmos speeded up their SPICE simulations (they were
using a VAX) by porting SPICE to a transputer array.

You might be able to use a high-end graphics card as an accelerator. It
would be a lot of work, though.

Leon

Ken Smith · Dec 31, 2005

In article <1135999288.512558.279370@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
Douglas Mota <douglasm@uninet.com.br> wrote:

Dear Friends,
I'm very new in using Spice. Is there any accelerator hardware that
speeds up the simulation of circuits?

Chances are you are best off with:

Buy a very fast PC with a large amount of RAM. Ideally it should have the
64 bit CPU.

Install SuSE 10 for 64 bit, wine and LTSpice.

I've run LTSpice on 4 OSes and it appears that the speed is:

Win-XP Slowest \ Call it a tie because I'm not
Win-98 Slowest / sure which was faster
Suse-9.2 32 bit
Suse-9.3 64 bit Fastest

If you are using XP make sure that the spice is not running in "98
compatible mode". That mode slows things down a lot. There are a bunch
of other things you can do to speed things up under XP. Tell your IT guy
what you need. He should be able to speed things up a bit (given perhaps
a week).

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kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

Robert · Dec 31, 2005

"Ken Smith" <kensmith@green.rahul.net> wrote in message
news:dp6cp5$qqq$5@blue.rahul.net...

In article <1135999288.512558.279370@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
Douglas Mota <douglasm@uninet.com.br> wrote:
Dear Friends,
I'm very new in using Spice. Is there any accelerator hardware that
speeds up the simulation of circuits?

Chances are you are best off with:

Buy a very fast PC with a large amount of RAM. Ideally it should have the
64 bit CPU.

Install SuSE 10 for 64 bit, wine and LTSpice.

I've run LTSpice on 4 OSes and it appears that the speed is:

Win-XP Slowest \ Call it a tie because I'm not
Win-98 Slowest / sure which was faster
Suse-9.2 32 bit
Suse-9.3 64 bit Fastest

If you are using XP make sure that the spice is not running in "98
compatible mode". That mode slows things down a lot. There are a bunch
of other things you can do to speed things up under XP. Tell your IT guy
what you need. He should be able to speed things up a bit (given perhaps
a week).

And then there's always the Intel vs. AMD difference. They benchmarked
PSpice back where I worked a number of years ago and found a significant
speedup with the AMD CPU. But that was quite a while ago. Don't know if it
holds nowadays.

Robert

Jim Thompson · Dec 31, 2005

On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 20:51:57 GMT, "Robert" <Robert@yahoo.com> wrote:

[snip]

And then there's always the Intel vs. AMD difference. They benchmarked
PSpice back where I worked a number of years ago and found a significant
speedup with the AMD CPU. But that was quite a while ago. Don't know if it
holds nowadays.

Robert

You are correct.

P3 -> P4 = Slower PSpice by more than 1/2

AMD is now roughly 8-9X faster than an equivalent speed P4, when
running PSpice.

Also an observation, don't know if it's real or happenstance, Win2K is
MUCH more stable on my AMD machine than on my P4 machine.

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice

480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax

Robert · Dec 31, 2005

"Jim Thompson" <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@My-Web-Site.com> wrote in
message news:tvrdr1dp1rervdm9rjcb0qd4m8tt9c1ig4@4ax.com...

On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 20:51:57 GMT, "Robert" <Robert@yahoo.com> wrote:

[snip]

And then there's always the Intel vs. AMD difference. They benchmarked
PSpice back where I worked a number of years ago and found a significant
speedup with the AMD CPU. But that was quite a while ago. Don't know if it
holds nowadays.

Robert

You are correct.

P3 -> P4 = Slower PSpice by more than 1/2

AMD is now roughly 8-9X faster than an equivalent speed P4, when
running PSpice.

Also an observation, don't know if it's real or happenstance, Win2K is
MUCH more stable on my AMD machine than on my P4 machine.

...Jim Thompson

I'd assume PSpice uses a lot of floating point calculations. Intel's always
favored Integer and general CPU operations over floating point given their
target markets so their floating point performance always sucked compared to
the competition.

And it's gotten worse with the P3 -> P4 transition. Relatively speaking.

Then again, they fell down when AMD brought the Memory controller on-chip
for increased performance. Intel seemed to not develop the x86 architecture
in favor of their Itanium, i860, and other attempts.

Robert

Jim Thompson · Dec 31, 2005

On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 23:18:01 GMT, "Robert" <Robert@yahoo.com> wrote:

"Jim Thompson" <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@My-Web-Site.com> wrote in
message news:tvrdr1dp1rervdm9rjcb0qd4m8tt9c1ig4@4ax.com...
[snip]

P3 -> P4 = Slower PSpice by more than 1/2

AMD is now roughly 8-9X faster than an equivalent speed P4, when
running PSpice.

Also an observation, don't know if it's real or happenstance, Win2K is
MUCH more stable on my AMD machine than on my P4 machine.

...Jim Thompson

I'd assume PSpice uses a lot of floating point calculations.

Yep. Back in the early x86 days you had to buy a separate math
co-processor chip.

Intel's always
favored Integer and general CPU operations over floating point given their
target markets so their floating point performance always sucked compared to
the competition.

And it's gotten worse with the P3 -> P4 transition. Relatively speaking.

Then again, they fell down when AMD brought the Memory controller on-chip
for increased performance. Intel seemed to not develop the x86 architecture
in favor of their Itanium, i860, and other attempts.

Robert

480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax

Robert · Jan 1, 2006

"Jim Thompson" <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@My-Web-Site.com> wrote in
message news:jg4er19g8a16j1papo010fvapidqa3b53d@4ax.com...

On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 23:18:01 GMT, "Robert" <Robert@yahoo.com> wrote:

"Jim Thompson" <To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@My-Web-Site.com> wrote in
message news:tvrdr1dp1rervdm9rjcb0qd4m8tt9c1ig4@4ax.com...
[snip]

P3 -> P4 = Slower PSpice by more than 1/2

AMD is now roughly 8-9X faster than an equivalent speed P4, when
running PSpice.

Also an observation, don't know if it's real or happenstance, Win2K is
MUCH more stable on my AMD machine than on my P4 machine.

...Jim Thompson

I'd assume PSpice uses a lot of floating point calculations.

Yep. Back in the early x86 days you had to buy a separate math
co-processor chip.

Intel's always
favored Integer and general CPU operations over floating point given their
target markets so their floating point performance always sucked compared
to
the competition.

And it's gotten worse with the P3 -> P4 transition. Relatively speaking.

Then again, they fell down when AMD brought the Memory controller on-chip
for increased performance. Intel seemed to not develop the x86
architecture
in favor of their Itanium, i860, and other attempts.

Robert

Intel apparently has decided their mass market is the gaming/graphics
crowd.

Heaven help us home-brew engineers if AMD turns that direction :-(

...Jim Thompson

Huh? The Gaming/Graphics crowd likes a lot of the stuff the Engineering
crowd does. Though the Hardware tends to be dedicated.

Intel seems to have decided that the Business crowd was the main Market.
General Word Processing, limited Spreadsheets, Power Point, Email and such.
Then the other major market being the home user with some of the above.

Given the Markets the way they have been I can't say they were/are wrong.
Engineering and other math intensive stuff has always been a minority part
of the Markets. The major math intensive stuff, graphics, moved off into
dedicated cards long ago that today rival the CPU for number of transistors.
Similarly for Audio.

Intel has always had ambitions to move that function into the CPU, or at
least the Chip Sets they make. And the hardware's gotten powerful enough to
do that with the low up to medium end. Maybe that trend will continue with
the newer multiple processor cores.

Robert

Andrzej XTC · Jan 2, 2006

I'd assume PSpice uses a lot of floating point calculations. Intel's always
favored Integer and general CPU operations over floating point given their
target markets so their floating point performance always sucked compared to
the competition.

You are joking right?
Until K7 there was only intel in that space.
I'm not an intel fanatic but come on.

XTC

Evgenii Rudnyi · Jan 2, 2006

Until K7 there was only intel in that space.

A few years ago, I made benchmarking for Intel (Windows), Sparc
(Solaris) and PowerPC (Mac OS X) with Lapack (solution of a system of
linear equations). It happened that Intel needed a doubled processor
clock to reach the same performance, that is, 800 MHz Intel was about
the same as 400 MHz Sparc or PowerPC.

I guess, the reason was a smaller L2 cache on Intel processors and, as
such, much less efficient BLAS. The processor clock is not everything.

I highly recommend you to browse BLAS (especially BLAS level 3):

http://www.netlib.org/blas/

Without tuned BLAS libraries, you cannot have a good performance in
linear algebra applications.

Best wishes,

Evgenii

--
http://Evgenii.Rudnyi.Ru/
http://www.imtek.uni-freiburg.de/simulation/mor4ansys/

qrk · Jan 2, 2006

On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 16:22:46 -0700, Jim Thompson
<To-Email-Use-The-Envelope-Icon@My-Web-Site.com> wrote:

Intel apparently has decided their mass market is the gaming/graphics
crowd.

Heaven help us home-brew engineers if AMD turns that direction :-(

...Jim Thompson

The few serious gaming folks I knew (2 years ago) went for the AMD
processors. AMD has been the favorite by the high-end gamers back a
few years. BTW Jim, I only see a 2:1 difference per GHz in AMD vs. P4
with things like PSpice. The newer P4 processors are a bit more
efficient than the old P4s, but not really significant. AMD 64-bit
processors have much better memory management than the old AMD 32-bit
and Intel processors. The AMD 64-bit processors under Win 2k have the
same processing efficiency as the old 32-bit units, but much better
memory interface. Unfortunately, PSpice doesn't seem to be affected
much by memory performance. FPGA floor planners are given a major
boost by AMD's 64-bit memory controller scheme over the old AMD 32-bit
processors. The old AMD 32-bit CPUs have an abysmal memory controller
scheme by any standard!

---
Mark

Douglas Mota · Jan 3, 2006

Hi Leon,
Your idea of using a graphics card seems to be interesting. Maybe it
could be a nice theme for a graduating project or even a PhD thesis...
Thanks a lot!

Douglas Mota · Jan 3, 2006

I'm a bit surprised about your results with WinE/SuSE, since WinE is an
emulator that adds a processing layer, when compared to the Windows
experiment. "Even in my wildest dreams" I could think that WinE would
be faster than WinXP itself !
Thanks for your suggestion, it will certainly help to guide me when I
upgrade my PC.
Regards!

Ken Smith · Jan 4, 2006

In article <1136293855.248417.99370@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
Douglas Mota <douglasm@uninet.com.br> wrote:

I'm a bit surprised about your results with WinE/SuSE, since WinE is an

Go take a look at the wine site. Wine stands for (W)ine (I)s (N)ot
(E)mulator.

Wine is an implementation of the windows API under linux. This means that
it is code that does the same functions for the same calls as windows does
but it doesn't use Microsoft(tm) code to do it.

When you run a program under XP, the body of the code runs in the 8086.
When it comes to a windows API call, XP has to switch to 16 bit mode to
call the WinME code, the WinME code then calls the Win98 code, which calls
the DOS-6.0 code, which was written in MS-Basic. This is why XP is so
slow. :>

BTW: At work I showed an XP user that my "network neighborhood" still
worked ok now that there are XP machines on the network. He was stunned
at how fast the display came up. I thought my SuSE was going a little
slow. At least on this one function SuSE seems to be much faster.

--
--
kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

Joel Kolstad · Jan 4, 2006

"Ken Smith" <kensmith@green.rahul.net> wrote in message
news:dpgndn$r2o$1@blue.rahul.net...

When you run a program under XP, the body of the code runs in the 8086.

This is only true if it's a 16 bit program, which -- even though Cadence has
not been particularly kind to PSpice in the past few years -- I can't imagine
PSpice is. It's a fair bet that any software written in the fast 3-5 years is
a native 32 bit application.

When it comes to a windows API call, XP has to switch to 16 bit mode to
call the WinME code, the WinME code then calls the Win98 code, which calls
the DOS-6.0 code, which was written in MS-Basic.

This is pure nonsense; DOS itself was written in assembly language.

BTW: At work I showed an XP user that my "network neighborhood" still
worked ok now that there are XP machines on the network. He was stunned
at how fast the display came up. I thought my SuSE was going a little
slow. At least on this one function SuSE seems to be much faster.

That has nothing whatsoever do so with the core Windows vs. SuSE OSes, it has
to do with how the 'desktops' go out and list the network neighborhood. XP
tries to be 'smart' and queries each machines as it sees it to retrieve
additional information about what resources it has, and this can be noticeably
slow. OK, I suppose this is still 'part of Windows XP,' and I'd be the first
to grant you that plenty of the included bits of XP are pretty lame, but then
again, so are plenty of the included bits of any *NIX OS as well. At their
cores, XP and *NIX are both decent OSes, and XP is arguably more sophisticated
(hence part of the reason Microsoft's IIS has better performance than Apache
on *NIX, Plug-N-Play -- while certainly not 100% trouble free -- tends to work
better than on *NIX, etc.)

---Joel Kolstad

Ken Smith · Jan 5, 2006

In article <11ro9qmgfuq89db@corp.supernews.com>,
Joel Kolstad <JKolstad71HatesSpam@yahoo.com> wrote:

"Ken Smith" <kensmith@green.rahul.net> wrote in message
news:dpgndn$r2o$1@blue.rahul.net...
When you run a program under XP, the body of the code runs in the 8086.

This is only true if it's a 16 bit program, which -- even though Cadence has
not been particularly kind to PSpice in the past few years -- I can't imagine
PSpice is. It's a fair bet that any software written in the fast 3-5 years is
a native 32 bit application.

When it comes to a windows API call, XP has to switch to 16 bit mode to
call the WinME code, the WinME code then calls the Win98 code, which calls
the DOS-6.0 code, which was written in MS-Basic.

This is pure nonsense; DOS itself was written in assembly language.

Try engaging your sense of humor and re-reading what I wrote above.

[...]

to do with how the 'desktops' go out and list the network neighborhood. XP
tries to be 'smart' and queries each machines as it sees it to retrieve
additional information about what resources it has, and this can be noticeably
slow.

I don't think that this is right. When the SMB "master browser" was
acting up, the XP machines couldn't see the same things as the Linux ones.
I think XP still uses the NMB as its source of information. At least
thats how it appears.

--
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kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

Joel Kolstad · Jan 5, 2006

"Ken Smith" <kensmith@green.rahul.net> wrote in message
news:dpi2uk$3q0$5@blue.rahul.net...

Try engaging your sense of humor and re-reading what I wrote above.

Oops. Sorry.

Some people really do thing that 'everything is still built
on top of DOS' in XP though!

Ken Smith · Jan 5, 2006

In article <11rp46fh6mrflb0@corp.supernews.com>,
Joel Kolstad <JKolstad71HatesSpam@yahoo.com> wrote:

"Ken Smith" <kensmith@green.rahul.net> wrote in message
news:dpi2uk$3q0$5@blue.rahul.net...
Try engaging your sense of humor and re-reading what I wrote above.

Oops. Sorry. Some people really do thing that 'everything is still built
on top of DOS' in XP though!

Yes the ignorance in amazing. Everyone knows it is all built on top of
MS-Basic.
--
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kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

Ken Smith · Jan 12, 2006

In article <1137066341.683300.280310@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
Douglas Mota <douglasm@uninet.com.br> wrote:

Hi Ken,
Do you know why has LTSpice run faster over a 64 bit OS, even though
it's a 32 bit application? Sorry if it's a stupid question...

I think there are two reasons:

(1)
The 64 bit OS gets involved in the graphics operations and draws the
marching waveforms faster.

(2)
The spice engine writes a *.raw file. The 64 bit OS does the write
faster.

It could also be that some onrelated difference in the machines is the
cause. I have not run the two OSs on the same machine.

I hope this isn't a stupid answer

--
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kensmith@rahul.net forging knowledge

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