Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] PS3/Cell BE platform

[Newell Jensen]

> Yes and no. From casual observation (I don't have a ppc platform 
> currently), all of gnuradio's dependencies already run on most linux ppc 
> and ppc64 distributions.  So getting it up and running shouldn't be too 
> difficult.
>
> The fun part will be modding GnuRadio and its dependencies to take 
> advantage of the SPEs.  So, even though there is a libfft (for example) 
> running on ppc/ppc64, it doesn't take advantage of the SPEs.  To do so is a 
> bit more involved than just swapping out some math instructions/functions.  
> It involves, from preliminary review, wrapping the chunk of code you want 
> on the SPE in an spu_thread, shipping data in and out via DMA, minimizing 
> ooo (out of order, ie branchy) code, then reworking the algorithm to take 
> advantage of the SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) instruction set.  
> Once that's done, recompile it with IBM's modified GNU toolchain, and watch 
> it crash.  :)
>
> hth,
>
> Jason.

Thanks for the info, it helped.  From what I have read it seems like SP3 is 
the only way to currently get a hold of the Cell BE, without having to buy 
an expensive workstation or server, right?  I am just curious because I am 
looking to get a new computer soon that I will be using for graduate school 
working on SDR (As of now, I am looking to work on GPR and possible 
improvements of this), and from the reading I have done it seems like this 
would be a great architecture for SDR.  Curious if you knew if they were 
going to offer this chipset for desktops or what your opinion about 
switching to that platform was?

Newell

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