Laptop for FPGA design

Wed Mar 03, 2010 3:46 pm   

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

Fri Mar 05, 2010 5:42 pm   

the fastest synthesis flow you'll get is with xilinx running on a 64-
bit linux machine (we tested with redhat i believe, but any mainstream
version should suffice). we actually saw a slow-down in some cases
with 64-bit windows which i believe xilinx may have fixed by now in
11.x, but i'm not sure. you'll want at least 4GB of ram unless your
designs are very small.