RE: [Discuss-gnuradio] SDR on General Purpose Processor Demo

[Ettus, Matt]

> http://murl.microsoft.com/LectureDetails.asp?837
> > 

Interesting presentation.  You'll of course need a Windows machine to see
it, though.

Major points --

1       Computation is cheap
2       Cache Misses are expensive
3       Memory bandwidth is key
4       Optimize for common case, not worst case like in hardware
5       Ride Moore's law, let AMD/Intel/Motorola do the hard work

        He also suggests 3 features for processors, since the lecturees are
in a domain-specific (we used to call that special-purpose, but I guess
that's out of fashion now) processors course.

        Branch on random -- I think he's nuts here.  Besides, good random
numbers are hard to get in the presence of major EMI on a processor chip

        Hashed caches -- sounds cool, but the idea died long ago.  He's
forgetting number 4 above...  Hashed caches would slow down hit times.

        Faster Integer MACs.  I strongly agree here, and would add all math,
not just MAC.  There's no reason for floating point to be faster than
integer.

Matt