Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] PS3/Cell BE platform

[Robert McGwier]

The Nividia GPU's have fft and blas running on them.  They are doing 
teraflops and the tools/SDK are available under NDA.  They do indeed 
have multiply , accumulate,  etc.

We are going to have GnuRadio in good enough shape to "take over the 
world" when these  high speed SDR engines (gaming tools that need DSP 
hardware)  become widely and openly available and as consumer product 
based, they should be inexpensive.  In my personal opinion, the SDR part 
is now relegated to the "mundane" and the most interesting work is now 
in AI/Cognitive work, classification, serious mesh networking, etc.  
that becomes more easily attainable with the high bandwidth channel back 
to the "front end" which is the completed SDR toolbox operating on these 
fancy DSP enabled processors with their huge bandwidth IO pipes.

The needs of the single-person-shooter games to render video on the fly 
rather than play through rastered and stored video has certainly been 
our friend.  The "good old days" ARE NOW.

Bob


Marcus Leech wrote:
> Jason wrote:
> > 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.
> Quite apart from the Cell processors, it also boasts dual GPUs, which 
> are also good at doing multiply-accumulate.
>    Hmmmm.
>
>
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--
AMSAT Director and VP Engineering. Member: ARRL, AMSAT-DL,
TAPR, Packrats, NJQRP, QRP ARCI, QCWA, FRC. ARRL SDR WG Chair
"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat.
You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los
Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly
the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there.
The only difference is that there is no cat." - Einstein