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Computer Hardware Specs for Performance

I'm posting to determine the hardware specs that seems to provide best performance for the Allegro suite. In short our board files are reaching over 200MB, 20,000+parts. The database is getting cumbersome. Has anyone had experience with large database sizes and things they have implemented on the hardware side to improve the situation? I have introduced measures suggested by Cadence with respect to features in Allegro, but I'm trying to focus on hardware in this posting. I understand "speed", "improvement" and "quick" is somewhat subjective to each person. I'm currently running 15.7 on XP SP2 with a Pentium 3.2GHz with 2 GB of RAM. Its fine for most of the boards, but databases around 80MB can start to be an issue. What your experience?

Cheers,

Mike

oldmouldy over 17 years ago

In terms of processing, if you are running a Pentium Hyper-Threading CPU, you could take a look at a Core 2 based system, these will usually be quite a bit faster for a given clock speed. If you are already running a Core 2 processor, you could look at the new Core i7 processors, again they get quite a rated speed up for the same clock rate as the Core 2.
If you are looking to stay with Windows, you could try a Vista 64-bit machine with 8G RAM, the OS may help you out with some more application caching, you would need to move to a 16.x version of the tools to be supported. A move to Linux will probably get you a performance uplift for the same hardware, as a very rough estimate, my Core 2 2.4GHz RHEL4 64-bit machine seems to be a fair match for my Core 2 3GHz Vista 64-bit machine.
I don't have any databases that are as large as 200MB to test so these comments are based on running with the designs that we have.
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pcbgeorge over 17 years ago

For what it is worth, I did a benchmark recently on identical hardware using WinXP and Vista. These benchmarks were done on the same system under VMWare so the OS could be switched. The differences in speed were relative, of course, since the virtual machines are inherently slower than a straight hardware install.

The Vista version was 5x slower on this particular benchmark. As always, Your Mileage May Vary.

Additionally, when I ran the benchmark on my Core2 laptop with 2GB of RAM, it is roughly half the speed of a low-end Linux test system running RHEL 4.0.

<OPINION>
I will push us over to Linux for our design platforms before I go to Vista. The problems of re-learning unix commands is far outweighed by the loss of productivity shown by the slowness Vista OS.
</OPINION>

--
George Patrick
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