[Discuss-gnuradio] PS3/Cell BE platform

[Jason]

All,

has anyone been looking at the Cell BE processor as a gnuradio backend 
platform?

For US$600 you get a Playstation 3 that boots linux, and has 7 128bit 
RISC processors, each with 256k local memory, all moving at ~3.4GHz. 
Each RISC processor is optimized for vector math / stream processing... :)

There is already an SDK (modified GNU toolchain) from IBM.  It seems to 
use a standard toolchain and apps that run on a 64bit ppc, but the 
toolchain is modified to compile special threads (different exec type) 
for the RISC processors (called SPEs).  threads are written in C against 
a provided library.

My thought for GnuRadio was to make near realtime mod/demod of ATSC a 
possibility.  As well as speeding up most other stream processing.

The SDK and info are here [1].  The .iso seems to have everything 
needed, and the provided code examples aren't too much different from 
writing pthreads.  The magic is in the added instruction set.

Good luck getting a hold of one before Christmas :)

Jason.

[1] http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/