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

[Eric Blossom]

On Thu, Nov 16, 2006 at 10:10:23PM +0000, Newell Jensen wrote:
> As I am new to all this please correct me if I am wrong as I am trying to 
> get a better understanding of everything.  I am assuming that even though 
> you are able run linux on the PS3 that you will not be able to use gnuradio 
> as it stands because of the different processor architechture, right?  That 
> is, the code in gnuradio wouldn't take advantage of the 7 SPEs etc.?  With 
> reading over what I have, it seems like using the Cell BE would be a great 
> thing and the future looks bright for this.  Thanks
> 
> Newell

We'd have to compile the blocks for the SPE's.
Hopefully the compiler does a decent job of extracting parallelism
from the code without too much help.  Of course we could hand tune the
filter kernels like we do today.

The scheduler and behind-the-scenes block interconnect/buffering would
need to be modified, but that's pretty well abstracted away from the
user's view of the world.

We'd need to build some tools that would allow us to measure
performance on the SPE and allow us to do feedback based assignment of
subsets of blocks in a graph to the SPEs.  I think this would be an
iterative process.  That is, partition the graph across the SPEs. Run
your test case.  Measure.  Repeat.

Sounds like fun.

And yes, I think we could get the HDTV receiver running in real time ;)

Eric