Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] The coming deluge of CPU cycles

[Eric Blossom]

On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 04:02:00PM +0930, Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> On Thursday 27 July 2006 15:39, Jason Hecker wrote:
> > Would an extra bit of hardware such as a PCI card with PLX's PCI9030
> > breaking out to the USRP with something like an 80 wire IDE cable be
> > suitable for high bandwidth, low latency and lowish cost?
> >
> > (http://www.plxtech.com/products/io_accelerators/PCI9030/default.htm)
> 
> A 9030 is target only, you'd need a 9054, 9056, 9060 or 9080 otherwise the 
> performance would not be very great.

Good point.  I've written drivers using the 9080 before it was pretty
easy to use.  The scatter/gather stuff worked fine for me, at least
from the point of view of the host side.

> Another option is to use a PCI soft core but then you run into licensing 
> issues.
> 
> I have looked at these for work and one problem (for us anyway) is that the 
> S/G engine doesn't treat the data as precious so it's not very useful for 
> reading from a FIFO. It's quite frustrating because that means you have a 
> chip which has an S/G engine built in but you have to make your own anyway :(
> 
> I'd love to be shown to be wrong though ;)
> 
> > I know someone who used gigabit ethernet driver chips hooked to an FPGA
> >   in order to push lots of digitised SVGA video data down a long length
> > of CAT5e for a KVM application.
> 
> Was that really ethernet framing? Or just using the CAT5 cable as 4 
> differential pairs?
> (Not that there's anything wrong with that - I imagine you'd still get good 
> cable lengths with the right drivers)

Eric