[hpsdr] [Discuss-gnuradio] Intel Atom is NICE.

[John Miles]

Agreed, I'm sure the demand for GPU-like resources will continue to grow,
but it will be met by what we would call massively-multicore CPUs rather
than by dedicated chips sold by the nVidias and ATIs out there.  Everything
else in the history of small computing has gone that way, so there seems no
reason to argue against the tide.  Those "MMC" CPUs will have flexible
memory architectures that you don't see in dedicated graphics processors,
and that'll make all the difference.

Intel actually positions Larrabee as a GPU, but that's a marketing faux pas,
IMHO.  It will come out looking like an expensive, low-performance GPU, and
people will see it that way without noticing that it represents a new
direction for PC CPUs in general.  Should be entertaining to see how it
plays out.

Re: the GPIB stuff, I've started to go back and put some work into
supporting lower-end, older spectrum analyzers, now that most of the apps
support most of the 90s-vintage HP/Tek/Advantest models.  The last build I
posted will actually capture screen dumps from the earliest Tek 492P/496P
analyzers, which took some doing.  Even the phase-noise app runs on those
now to some extent.  I've done most of what I wanted to do with GPIB, so I
plan to add some support for baseband PN analysis with sound cards, and
baseband-to-HF analysis with (e.g.) the SDR-IQ.

There are numerous apps that all support different instruments, but in
general the user guides for the 3 main apps linked from
http://www.ke5fx.com/gpib/readme.htm have up-to-date lists of supported
devices.

-- john, KE5FX


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robert McGwier [mailto:rwmcgwier at gmail.com]
> Sent: Monday, December 29, 2008 6:18 PM
> To: John Miles
> Cc: Newman, Timothy; Marcus D. Leech; hpsdr at lists.hpsdr.org;
> FlexRadio at flex-radio.biz; qs1r at yahoogroups.com; tim.newman.vt at gmail.com;
> discuss-gnuradio at gnu.org
> Subject: Re: [hpsdr] [Discuss-gnuradio] Intel Atom is NICE.
>
>
> The new I7 intel processors have a really amazing amount of horsepower
> but a tremendous amount of onboard stuff is designed to work
> intimately with the peripherals to bring on high speed graphics.  Now
> if your argument is that all of this is going to be moved into the
> GPP,  I might agree that we will see some of this.  If you are arguing
> that the demand for an almost exponential increase in capabilities in
> graphics hardware for the purposes of virtual reality and rendering
> live and without memorex is not going to be happening, we are in
> profound disagreement.
>
> John, can you give me (and the others here) a pointer to the list of
> GPIB, etc. devices your fantastic stuff currently supports?  I went
> from seeing it in the early days with a handful of things supported to
> seeing friends of mine (like W2GPS) running their labs with your code.
>
>
> Bob
>


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