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From: Pete Fraser on 3 Mar 2010 09:48
I'm going to be travelling soon, and will continue to
do FPGA design from the road. I'll need to get a
new laptop for this.

Any thoughts?
I think something based on the Core i7-620M might
be fast enough and low power, but they seem rare.
Looks like I'll probably end up with something with
a Core i7-720QM or a Core i7-820QM.
Anybody here have any experience with on of these
machines? Is there another processor I should be looking at?

The obvious OS with a new machine would be Windows 7,
64-bit, but I'm not sure my software will run on that.
I'm running ISE Foundation 10.1 (and don't plan on
upgrading quite yet). I also use Modelsim XE, but will
be upgrading to Modelsim PE or Aldec.

It's not clear what software runs on what OS. It seems
that I might be safer with 32-bit XP for the Modelsim
and the Xilinx software. Windows 7 Professional
seems to have a downgrade option to XP. Does that
mean I choose to install one or the other OS, or can
I install both and switch between them? 7 Pro seems
to have some sort of XP mode. Will that work for these
tools? Is there a performance penalty over a real XP
installation? Can I emulate XP 32-bit under W7 64-bit?

Thanks for your thoughts and suggestions.

Pete


From: John_H on 3 Mar 2010 10:07
On Mar 3, 9:48 am, "Pete Fraser" <pfra...(a)covad.net> wrote:
> I'm going to be travelling soon, and will continue to
> do FPGA design from the road. I'll need to get a
> new laptop for this.
>
> Any thoughts?

Since you're on ISE 10.1, there's no support for multi-threading.
Going with the higher speed i7-620M would give you the best bang for
your buck until or unless you upgrade ISE. While 11.2 introduced
multi-threading for placement, routing won't be multi-threaded until
12.x sometime according to one Xilinx Answer.

Multi-threading is great when software's designed for it. We've
stepped back from highest-speed processors in favor of more cores to
leverage the performance. While I appreciate being able to check
email during a place & route, I have yet to truly utilize the 8
threads across 4 cores in my desktop i7.

Do you want a laptop to perform better now or to perform better in a
year or two?

I can provide no guidance on operating system.
From: General Schvantzkoph on 3 Mar 2010 10:21
On Wed, 03 Mar 2010 06:48:33 -0800, Pete Fraser wrote:

> I'm going to be travelling soon, and will continue to do FPGA design
> from the road. I'll need to get a new laptop for this.
>
> Any thoughts?
> I think something based on the Core i7-620M might be fast enough and low
> power, but they seem rare. Looks like I'll probably end up with
> something with a Core i7-720QM or a Core i7-820QM.
> Anybody here have any experience with on of these machines? Is there
> another processor I should be looking at?
>
> The obvious OS with a new machine would be Windows 7, 64-bit, but I'm
> not sure my software will run on that. I'm running ISE Foundation 10.1
> (and don't plan on upgrading quite yet). I also use Modelsim XE, but
> will be upgrading to Modelsim PE or Aldec.
>
> It's not clear what software runs on what OS. It seems that I might be
> safer with 32-bit XP for the Modelsim and the Xilinx software. Windows 7
> Professional seems to have a downgrade option to XP. Does that mean I
> choose to install one or the other OS, or can I install both and switch
> between them? 7 Pro seems to have some sort of XP mode. Will that work
> for these tools? Is there a performance penalty over a real XP
> installation? Can I emulate XP 32-bit under W7 64-bit?
>
> Thanks for your thoughts and suggestions.
>
> Pete


The most important thing for the hardware is cache size and RAM. Get 8G
of RAM and make sure that you don't get a bargain processor with an
undersized cache.

As for the OS, my suggestion would be to use 64 bit Fedora 12. CAE tools
have been running on 64 bit Linux for years so they are completely
stable. I use both Altera and Xilinx tools on Fedora. ModelSim runs on 64
bit Linux also and of course NCsim and VCS are Linux only. The iCore7 has
hardware virtualization support and Fedora 12 comes with KVM built in so
you can run multiple VMs painlessly. I run both XP and CentOS5.4 VMs on
top of Fedora, the performance is very close to native, I've benchmarked
CentOS and it's at least 95% of native speed. I haven't benchmarked XP
but it feels very fast as long as you use Rdesktop to access it instead
of the console. If you need to run Windows CAE tools for some reason the
advantage of using a VM is that you can have more then one VM which gets
around XPs 3G total memory limit, although you would still have that
limit for each application. Obviously I don't recommend using XP for
anything more intense then MS Word, CAE tools should be run on Linux.
From: emeb on 3 Mar 2010 11:20
On Mar 3, 7:48 am, "Pete Fraser" <pfra...(a)covad.net> wrote:
> I'm going to be travelling soon, and will continue to
> do FPGA design from the road. I'll need to get a
> new laptop for this.
>
> Any thoughts?
> I think something based on the Core i7-620M might
> be fast enough and low power, but they seem rare.
> Looks like I'll probably end up with something with
> a Core i7-720QM or a Core i7-820QM.
> Anybody here have any experience with on of these
> machines? Is there another processor I should be looking at?
>
> The obvious OS with a new machine would be Windows 7,
> 64-bit, but I'm not sure my software will run on that.
> I'm running ISE Foundation 10.1 (and don't plan on
> upgrading quite yet). I also use Modelsim XE, but will
> be upgrading to Modelsim PE or Aldec.
>
> It's not clear what software runs on what OS. It seems
> that I might be safer with 32-bit XP for the Modelsim
> and the Xilinx software. Windows 7 Professional
> seems to have a downgrade option to XP. Does that
> mean I choose to install one or the other OS, or can
> I install both and switch between them? 7 Pro seems
> to have some sort of XP mode. Will that work for these
> tools? Is there a performance penalty over a real XP
> installation? Can I emulate XP 32-bit under W7 64-bit?
>
> Thanks for your thoughts and suggestions.
>
> Pete

What size of designs are you working on? FWIW, I've had good luck
doing smaller stuff in WinXP running from the Bootcamp partition on a
MacBook using VMware. I've also gotten stuff built on an EEE901A with
WebPack 10.1 under EEEbuntu.

Eric
From: Jason Thibodeau on 3 Mar 2010 15:13
On 03/03/2010 11:20 AM, emeb wrote:
> On Mar 3, 7:48 am, "Pete Fraser"<pfra...(a)covad.net> wrote:
>> I'm going to be travelling soon, and will continue to
>> do FPGA design from the road. I'll need to get a
>> new laptop for this.
>>
>> Any thoughts?
>> I think something based on the Core i7-620M might
>> be fast enough and low power, but they seem rare.
>> Looks like I'll probably end up with something with
>> a Core i7-720QM or a Core i7-820QM.
>> Anybody here have any experience with on of these
>> machines? Is there another processor I should be looking at?
>>
>> The obvious OS with a new machine would be Windows 7,
>> 64-bit, but I'm not sure my software will run on that.
>> I'm running ISE Foundation 10.1 (and don't plan on
>> upgrading quite yet). I also use Modelsim XE, but will
>> be upgrading to Modelsim PE or Aldec.
>>
>> It's not clear what software runs on what OS. It seems
>> that I might be safer with 32-bit XP for the Modelsim
>> and the Xilinx software. Windows 7 Professional
>> seems to have a downgrade option to XP. Does that
>> mean I choose to install one or the other OS, or can
>> I install both and switch between them? 7 Pro seems
>> to have some sort of XP mode. Will that work for these
>> tools? Is there a performance penalty over a real XP
>> installation? Can I emulate XP 32-bit under W7 64-bit?
>>
>> Thanks for your thoughts and suggestions.
>>
>> Pete
>
> What size of designs are you working on? FWIW, I've had good luck
> doing smaller stuff in WinXP running from the Bootcamp partition on a
> MacBook using VMware. I've also gotten stuff built on an EEE901A with
> WebPack 10.1 under EEEbuntu.
>
> Eric

I think it is important to note the size of your designs. I actually use
an HP mini 210HD for a lot of my designs. I run Fedora 12, and ISE 11.1.
Sure its not as speedy as can be, but it gets the job done.

--
Jason Thibodeau
www.jayt.org
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