The Designer's Guide Community Forum

The Designer's Guide Community Forum
https://designers-guide.org/forum/YaBB.pl
Simulators >> Circuit Simulators >> speed comparison of spectre in LInux and Solaris
https://designers-guide.org/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1078533838

Message started by jimmy li on Mar 5^th, 2004, 4:43pm

Title: speed comparison of spectre in LInux and Solaris
Post by jimmy li on Mar 5^th, 2004, 4:43pm

HI,

Has anyone compared the simulation speed of Spectre in PC using Linux and Sun using Solaris? I expect Linux version will be faster taking advantages of high speed PC, but no idea how fast it can be.

Thanks,

jimmy

Title: Re: speed comparison of spectre in Linux and Solar
Post by August West on Mar 6^th, 2004, 10:43am

If your Linux machine uses IDE drives, disk access can be slow, so on large jobs you might not get the speed up you expect.

-August

Title: Re: speed comparison of spectre in LInux and Solar
Post by jimmy on Mar 6^th, 2004, 11:24am

Thank you Auguest,

Do you know how can I get speed improvement taking advantages of high speed P4 CPU and large RAM.

thanks,
jimmy

Title: Re: speed comparison of spectre in LInux and Solar
Post by August West on Mar 7^th, 2004, 1:54pm

I think a high speed P4 CPU and large RAM provides its own reward.

August

Title: Re: speed comparison of spectre in LInux and Solar
Post by Paul on Mar 9^th, 2004, 12:17pm

Hi Jimmy, hi August

Hopefully your simulation time is limited by the CPU and not by the disk. In the latter case you should consider diminishing the number of nodes to be saved to reduce your simulation time. In the case of CPU limitation, you can expect a non-neglegible improvement (2x?) on P4 with respect to SPARC. I have heard that AMD performs even better for simulations than P4.

Maybe the new Sun processor to come out will catch up a little bit?

Large RAM is not mandatory for many simulations, but very useful to run DRC/LVS and P&R, both on Sun and PC.

Title: Re: speed comparison of spectre in LInux and Solar
Post by August West on Mar 9^th, 2004, 3:19pm

Spectre itself is very efficient with memory, so large amounts of memory is not necessary except for the largest of circuits. However, when running SpectreRF, it is important to have lots of memory. Lots and lots of memory.

-August

Title: Re: speed comparison of spectre in LInux and Solar
Post by Rob Mehregan on Mar 16^th, 2004, 7:30am

We ran alot of comparisons about a year ago to benchmark Spectre on a Linux based P4 vs. a Sun running Solaris. We found that at the desktop, a 2.8 GHz P4 running Linux with 1 gig of RAM could simulate 3x to 4x faster than a Blade 150 with similar RAM. In our server farm, the Blade 1000's held up better but still the P4 machines running Linux outperformed them by 1 - 2x.

- Rob