Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Intel Atom is NICE.

[Eric A. Cottrell]

Bob McGwier wrote:
> And GPU's are going to become commodity priced quickly and possibly even move 
> into the GPP and replace older ways of doing floating point.  With Nvidia CUDA, 
> you can write code for your GPP, call GPU with intrinsics to get pretty quick 
> payback while a better longer term strategy is worked on.
>
> The future of really hard to program heterogeneous/not symmetric multiple core 
> processors,  irrespective of how great the bandwidth is,  I don't think is 
> looking all that rosy.  It simply cannot take months and months to get speed to 
> make the processor pay or the cost per flop, when ALL COSTS are amortized 
> (expensive people, etc.) begins to look bad.
>
> Bob
>   
Hello,

I bought the earlier version of the motherboard with just the 10/100 
ethernet.  I put it in a MI-100 case and it is a nice little system.  I 
have not gotten a chance to use it with GNURadio much so I have not 
commented about it on the list.  I am thinking of using it as a car 
computer.

However, I have tried it under Windows XP with my AutumnWave OnAir GT 
USB HDTV tuner.  I understand this tuner uses the computer to decode the 
HDTV signal.  On my older Thinkpad z60t (1.73 GHz Pentium M) the HDTV 
decode takes about 80% CPU and there are ocassional gliches.  I was not 
happy.  With the Intel Atom (1.60 GHz), the HDTV decode takes about 40% 
CPU and decode is excellent.  I suspect the hyperthreading feature of 
the CPU is causing the improved decoding.

I recently bought a Acer Aspire One (Intel Atom and 120GB HD) on sale.  
I plan to put Linux on it and see how it works with GNURadio and the 
USRP.  I feel the advantage of the Intel Atom is reasonable performance 
in a small package.  The Atom-based netbook may be useful for dealing 
with ham and conventional narrow-bandwidth signals in a portable/mobile 
SDR package. 

The 945 chipset is power hungry but I heard there is another chipset for 
the Atom in the works.  Hopefully the new chipset will allow using the 
GPU for SDR work.

73 Eric