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

[Eric Blossom]

On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 12:53:06PM -0400, Marcus Leech wrote:
> So, I read yesterday that Intel is going to start introducing quad-core 
> CPUs sometime late this
> year, rather than 2007 as originally announced.
> 
> Two questions occur to me:
> 
>    o How can we best take advantage of the multiple CPU cores in Gnu Radio?
>       Being able to process larger bandwidths and "do stuff" with that 
>       bandwidth would seem to be a good goal.   Like implementing a 
>       CDMA/GSM/whatever basestation RF processor all inside Gnu Radio, for 
>       example.  [Me, I just want to be able to process radio astronomy data 
>       at higher bandwidths :-)].

I see two paths that can get us there:

  (1) dynamic partitioning of the flow graph across processors in
      SMP/multi-core machines.

  (2) m-blocks dynamically scheduled across processors on SMP/multi-core

Once N-cores gets sufficiently large (8 ?), I think we start moving to
a thread / block model.

>    o Is it time to think about moving away from USB for USRP?  Perhaps to
>       PCI-X 2.0, or PCI-Express?

Or perhaps Express Card.  That would retain the laptop's portability advantage.

Eric