On Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:46:38 -0700 (PDT), spectrallypure
<jorgelagos@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>For instance, I was unsure about the relative im****tance between CPU
>speed vs. number of cores. As an example, what of the following would
>be a better platform for running, say, large Spectre simulations?
>
>-A 3.16GHz dual core (FSB 1333MHz) with 6MB of cache and 4GB of RAM
>(fast, but just 2 cores)
>-A 2.66GHz quad core (FSB 1333MHz) with 12MB of cache and 4GB of RAM
>(slower, but with 4 cores & more cache)?
>
Actually they have the same amount of cache per cpu which is usually
what counts. Unless you have really well-parallelized programs (ala
DRC) I'd go with dual core, faster processor.
> ...I recall someone stating in this forum that "spice simulations are
>as single-threaded as an application can be"...
This is no longer true. There are multi-threaded spice simulators from
all major vendors some with pretty incredible performance increases
but I am not sure if Cadence is one of them. Spectre is not a tool I
use that often.
> does this mean that
>having more cores won't really improve performance appreciably, at
>least when talking about Spectre simulations?
>
No. If you have a multi-threaded spice, having multiple cores
definitely helps.
>What about the requirements for other tasks, like DRC and synthesis?
Calibre has very powerful sup****t multi-threaded DRC and LVS. I am not
aware of any multi-threaded synthesis at the moment but routing from
major vendors are very nicely parallelized (Nanoroute was a very nice
example earlier and most other vendors caught up by now) and even some
placers are multi-threaded.
Kal
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