Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] My First HDTV screenshot from USRP

[Marcus Leech]

Eric Blossom wrote:
> <soapbox-mode>
>
>   You know, I wish you guys would quit screwing around with the 0.9
>   code, and instead help us *all* move forward by investing some time
>   in porting it to 2.x.  The framework is already set up, and the
>   first 4 blocks have been ported and tested.  I'd really like some
>   people to step up and finish it off.  It's in CVS under gr-atsc.
>   We've also got *much* faster filtering algorithms in 2.x.  We might
>   even be able to get it running in real time on a dual processor
>   machine.  Today's machines are a lot faster than when we first wrote it.
>
> </soapbox-mode>
>
>   

Roughly every 18 months, available CPU speed doubles.  Which means that 
using todays
 machines, if you can just-barely-not-quite do real time now, in 18 
months you'll be able to,
 on a machine that costs you roughly what your current machine cost 
you.  Single-CPU
 Moores law *is* slowing down some, but multi-core appears to be making 
great
 strides.

My astronomy apps are pigs.  But I can do useful stuff with them.  On my 
single-processor
 2.6Ghz Celeron D, I can manage 2Mhz of combined total-power and 
spectral observations.  On
 Lamars Dual-CPU Xeon, he's able to do 8Mhz using the same code.

My pulsar application can run at roughly 1Mhz bandwidth on my single-CPU 
2.6Ghz Celeron D, and
 we haven't tested it on Lamars Dual Xeon system yet.  When the 
de-dispersion filters get longer,
 that 1Mhz will be pushing it on a single-CPU system.

I'm having a hard time believing that processing ATSC video is a *less* 
CPU-intensive application than
 pulsar processing, but I could be completely wrong.