Yes. For a work project my group is purchasing two Mercury 1U Cell
servers. This will make ATSC and HDTV a real possibility. These
Mercury servers have a high bandwidth PCI express connection for getting
data in and out of the world. Another fellow and I will be porting
GnuRadio to the Cell BE ont he Mercury. It is not for consumers in
this form. These things are over $10,000 a piece with PPC Linux
installed. I cannot wait until we get the PS3's hacked to be Linux
desktops.
Bob
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.
[1] http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/
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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
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