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TURBO BOOST FPGA COMPILE SPEEDS - please support this idea

Guys forgive the crassness of 'shouting' in the post title, but this is an idea that can drastically speed up FPGA compile times under windows, and let's face it, who wouldn't want that? What's more, it's easy to implement so if we all get behind it NI has little reason not to go for it.

 

PLEASE VOTE FOR THIS IDEA to see it as standard in a future release.

 

http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-FPGA-Idea-Exchange/Turbo-Boost-the-speed-of-FPGA-compiles-under-Wind...

 

ALSO,

 

If you support this, please comment here to keep this thread bumped for maximum forum exposure.

 

Thanks.

Message 1 of 11
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All the views of this thread and only one person gave a Kudo to the idea!

 

You don't want to double the speed of your FPGA compiles? Smiley Frustrated

0 Kudos
Message 2 of 11
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Well I'll give this thread one final kick for Monday morning, then if there's no decent response I declare a win for the apathetics and keep the benefits of my 'secret' knowledge for myself.

0 Kudos
Message 3 of 11
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No need to be so dramatic.  Some ideas take a while to gain traction.

 

I think this is also something people need to try out before giving support to.  Have a little patience.

Message 4 of 11
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Point taken my friend - as you can probably tell, I really want to see this one in there!

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Message 5 of 11
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Hi ToeCutter,

 

Thanks for highlighting this, it is probably something that will help a lot of people, I'll give it a try at some point in the office here.

 

I highly doubt there being any possiblity of "including" this, as it involves external microsoft tools, changing BIOS settings.

 

 

Perhaps it is something we can highlight with web based content, I shall look into this, I expect it is a topic people may search for regularly.

 

Regards,

Ian S
Applications Engineer CLA
National Instruments UK&Ireland
Message 6 of 11
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Thanks Ian, would be interested to hear your results.

 

I think your doubt as to inclusion as a standard feature is a little premature.

1) This requires no external tool for Win7 onwards (not sure about Vista). Very simple to identify the OS and only enable the feature for these machines.

 

2) Turbo boost is enabled by default on core architecture motherboards, so no BIOS fiddling. I guess a bit of research is required here as to what effect the command has if turbo is disabled. I suspect it won't be detrimental, and if it is there's probably a method of detecting whether the feature is enabled and acting accordingly.

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Message 7 of 11
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Probably even without turbo boost, simply preventing processor hopping is going to shave off a measurable amount of time for any given compilation.

 

The benefit if of course much more noticeable if turbo boost is utilised.

Message 8 of 11
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@ToeCutter wrote:

 

2) Turbo boost is enabled by default on core architecture motherboards, so no BIOS fiddling. I guess a bit of research is required here as to what effect the command has if turbo is disabled. I suspect it won't be detrimental, and if it is there's probably a method of detecting whether the feature is enabled and acting accordingly.


The command does not require turbo boost to be enabled. It just assigns the compiler to a certain CPU core and thus avoids CPU hopping (which can already help a lot for single threaded applications). If turbo is enabled it might come to play since only one CPU core is busy. If you're doing other things in parallel the OS might put some load of other applications to other cores, then turbo boost gain will be lower or zero, but still the benefit of avoiding CPU hopping remains.

 

What could be more of a concern is whether assigning the compiler to core 1 is always a good idea. Maybe the core should be configurable.

 

Message 9 of 11
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Thanks for the info, dan. I think you make a convincing argument regarding the option to select the core.

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Message 10 of 11
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