Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Using gnu-radio for project

[Philip Balister]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 1:48 PM, Eric Blossom <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 03:13:09PM -0700, Inderaj Bains wrote:
>> Thanks Eric,
>> Yes I want to use SIMD. Since I want to spend most time improving
>> performance, it would be nice if I can start off from something functioning
>> or put together something quickly.
>> How much effort would it be to get a GSM (other?) all software system
>> together (except A/D I guess). Maybe I could use pre-generated streams on
>> both ends in software.
>>
>> Thanks
>> Inderaj
>
> This is great.  What we've been thinking about is building a library
> of SIMD accelerated primitives, along the lines of Intel's Integrated
> Performance Primitives.  The crucial differences would be: free
> software (GPLv3); support for SSE, SSE2, SSE3, Altivec and Cell SPE
> instruction sets.

Do you mind adding NEON to this list?  NEON is a SIMD unit on ARM
Cortex-A8 processors. Information on NEON instructions is at
http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.dui0204h/Bcfjicfj.html.
Sorry it si the superseded link, I'm too lazy to find the current one
:)

> Our working title for this is the "Generic Performance Primtives" (GPP).
>
> One unresolved issue is what code to start with.  We need a framework
> that provides for reference implementations, QA, testing all argument
> alignments, correctness, performance, etc; runtime dispatch based on
> the equivalent of cpuid; can be built as both shared and static
> libraries (need static on the SPE).
>
> The basic idea (for the user visible routines) would be to start with
> the well thought out API described in Volume 1 (Signal Processing) of
> the IPP docs, peforming a s/ipp/gpp/g.
>
>  
> http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/isn/downloads/softwareproducts/pdfs/346499.pdf
>
>  
> http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/isn/downloads/softwareproducts/pdfs/346532_userguide_win_ia32.pdf
>
>
> Two possible starting points are:
>
>  liboil      http://liboil.sourceforge.net    (currently x86, x86-64 and PPC)

liboil is used by a number of desktop programs, spending time on this
would be a win for me :)

Philip

>  Framewave   http://framewave.sourceforge.net (x86 and x86-64 only)
>
>  (Framewave is built on top of SSEPlus, a thin wrapper on top of the SSE
>  C/C++ intrinsics.  http://sseplus.sourceforge.net
>  Mostly it appears that they provide emulations for instructions that
>  are missing at a particular level.  E.g., your code could target SSE3,
>  and they'd emulate the missing addsub instruction in terms of SSE.)
>
>
> For starters, it would be great if you could look at these two options
> (and any others that you come across) and let us know how you think
> these would work out as starting points, given the requirements above.
>
> If this seems like more than you want to bite off, I can provide a
> list of high-priority functions and you could start implementing the
> reference version and any of the SSE*, Altivec or SPE versions that
> grab your attention.  We're big on complex arithmetic :-)
>
> Please let me know how this sounds and if you've got any comments or 
> questions.
>
> Thanks!
> Eric
>
>
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