[Discuss-gnuradio] Intel Atom is NICE.

[Bob McGwier]

I am running GnuRadio, SDRMAX, and  PowerSDR on my new Intel ATOM 330 MiniITX motherboard.  I had to put a firewire card in the single PCI slot.  The integrated intel graphics are nice and spiffy (glxgears is at 800 fps if you turn off the desktop enhancements, no wiggly windows please).

 

At 96000 PowerSDR is running under 15% CPU.  The ATOM burns EIGHT watts and has dual hyperthread cores  (shows up as four processors in task manager).

 

My intel ATOM computer, case, memory, disk, keyboard/mouse cost me $275.

 

The motherboard is available for $85  (with processor on it, air cooled) at NewEgg.   I used it for firewire since there is no firewire.  You no longer need the LCD display stuff so I hope that is dumped.

The ATOM 330 supports SSE,SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3 so it will run SIMD code quite nicely and does so with GnuRadio, SDRMAX, and PowerSDR.

 

 

Intel atom mobo/processor bundle: $85

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121359

 

case:  $56

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811154084

 

memory:  $21

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134192

 

drive:  $79

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136320

 

 

The case has a completely overkill 250w power supply.  They must be expecting you to put a Pentium D MiniITX board in there.  ;-).  It was an excessive thing anyway and done only because it will sit next to the television in the den.

 

Already had keyboard and mouse and the firewire card was $12 the last time I looked.  The (new from Santa) 52” TV is my monitor.  Running Ubuntu 8.10 and Windows XP Pro.    I have used it to do GnuRadio, PowerSDR, SDRMAX II,  streamed video’s from Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, and more.    

 

This is a cheap enough, high enough performance computer to complete dedicate it to the task, and never run into a stupid outlook glitch for PowerSDR.  On Ubuntu, it is spiffy to compile GnuRadio pretty quickly with make –j4.

 

I will give some GnuRadio and SDRMaxII numbers later.  Phil Covington has one so maybe he can give us SDRMax II numbers while I concentrate on GnuRadio/DttSP.

 

I will be the first to admit it is not as fast as my QX6700 Ubuntu machine or the new I7 extreme machine (dual Fedora, Vista 64 for Nvidia Tesla programming which requires a GOOD pciE-x16 slot and SLI support and a $400 Mobo) but it is plenty fast for these dedicated job small CPU tasks (SDR) and really cheap.  I made no great effort to save money, it is just cheap anyway. 

 

I am pushing ahead on the Beagleboard because  I think we need to collectively turn some attention to the embedded low power SoC and I combine (along with my embedded programming friends) both ARM and SIMD DSP for SDR.

 

Happy New Year,

Bob

  

 

ARRL SDR Working Group Chair

Member: ARRL, AMSAT, AMSAT-DL, TAPR, Packrats,

NJQRP, QRP ARCI, QCWA, FRC.

"And yes I said, yes I will Yes", Molly Bloom