Best CPU for Xilinx ISE

Goi

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
6,763
6
91
Hi,

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but I'm wondering if there are any benchmarks of various CPUs with Xilinx ISE? I'm currently using a Pentium Dual Core E2200 clocked to 2.97GHz, and it's still kinda slow. Task Manager shows that it's only using 1 core(50% CPU usage) so that sucks. Wondering if the lack of cache is causing a huge hit...
 

PCTC2

Diamond Member
Feb 18, 2007
3,892
33
91
Oh Xilinx ISE. Good memories. Well, maybe bad memories. Rather touchy program back when I used it.

Since it isn't multithreaded, the only things you can do to speed it up is give it more RAM and a fast CPU such as an E8400. But I would NOT recommend upgrading. Xilinx is a rather bulky program that is slow anyways. I don't think it would be worth any upgrade. How much RAM do you have anyways?
 

Lord Banshee

Golden Member
Sep 8, 2004
1,495
0
0
I think the Professional Version has some multi-threaded supported, but yeah overall it is single-threaded.

I agree with PCTC2, Get a Fast Core2Due Cpu should do you well and 4GB never hurts.

But when i was in college (not long ago) using ISE i wished i had a QUad core, not because of ISE but because i had many things open at once when working with Digital Design projects such has pdf's of specs, work assignments, pin-out for fpga board, word for the report, screen capture for grabbing nicely cropped images, and so on.

Last I've read Digital Simulators at this time perfer to be single threaded because it is more productive to run 4 different simulations on one quad core than to run 1 simulation on the same machine. But seeing how much better multi-threaded performance is represent on more code i think i rather faster multi-threaded sims for interactive debug, and single threaded for batch jobs.
 

Goi

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
6,763
6
91
OK thanks. Not intending to upgrade, just wondering if it was heavy on the ALU or on the memory subsystem. I have 2GB of memory on that machine.