Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Problems running example audio_fft.py

[Marcus Leech]

Michael Dickens wrote:
> I would be quite curious about the CPU utilization of a Linux box - 
> along with the hardware specs to make the judgement relatively 
> correct.  Even better would be to try an Intel Mac running both OSX 
> and Linux and compare the CPU utilization ... hmmm ... that would be 
> pretty cool so I'll look into it. - MLD
I don't know about usrp_wfm..., but my radio astronomy combined 
spectral/continuum application consumes about 90% CPU
 when looking at 4Mhz bandwidth, with FFTs of length 2048 and an 
fft_rate of 12.  This is on an FC5 box, with a single
 Celeron D running at 2.4Ghz, 512M of memory.  The fftsink window has 
to run the FFTs in "sampled" mode in order
 to get any kind of realtime response at all (that is, the FFT only 
gets to look at partial data, rather than continuous data).
 This reduces spectral sensitivity quite a bit, and I'm thinking of 
revamping my application to reduce the total bandwidth
 going into the spectral part, in order to improve sensitivity.   
Continuum sensitivity needs as much bandwidth as possible,
 though :-(