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.