[OT]: Altera DE1/DE2 board

On 1/17/2011 5:12 AM, Alexandre Souza - Listas wrote: I just bought a Terasic Altera DEO board this weekend -- it should arrive this week. I've had a Xilinx Spartan-3E board for a couple years, and I wanted to go to Altera and check out the competition. Basically, see how capable Altera is in comparison. Most of the Xilinx tools(ISE, Project Navigator, EDK) seem pretty big, and if not bloated, then just resource hungry(and I'm not talking about synthesis or place/route.) Altera's Quartus II seems better, but I haven't played with it enough yet to make a call. Everything I read seems to indicate that Altera's software is not only better laid out, more lightweight, but is actually several times faster for the whole compilation. Plus, I've heard from friends who work in the field, that they do a better job of squeezing logic into less amount of resources by optimizing w/ better results than ISE. The call between the DE0 board and the DE1 board is tough. The DE0 is newer and contains a Cyclone III although it is slightly smaller than the Cyclone II on the DE1. The on-chip resources of the Cyclone III kill the Cyclone II --- namely offering much more on-chip dedicated memory(and are M9K blocks vs M4K blocks), having more available 18x18 multipliers, and just about every other stat. The Cyclone II chosen for the DE1 has about 18k logic elements where the Cyclone III chosen on the DE0 has about 15k. 3k, you say, but that's another 20% or so. Sorry for hijacking your thread. :) Keith