[hpsdr] NVIDIA Jetson Nano SBC - YouTube video

[Chris Smith]

Scott

Apart from the cost advantages that Shirley mentions, as far as I’m concerned the main advantage is relief from the tyranny of Microsoft. Any boards/SBCs which can run a version of Linux can run linhpsdr.

I use linhpsdr from John Melton exclusively to control my HPSDR Atlas kit. It runs very well on my 4-core 2.4GHz Intel board but a Raspberry Pi 3B+ struggles even at 9600. I had audio reports which likened my voice to that of a Darlek speaking under water!

I have a Jetson TK1 which I bought when they were first announced and there was a flurry of interest in the possible use of the (192) CUDA cores. However, unless I’ve missed a thread, there was never any development effort in that direction and the TK1 has languished on the shelf apart from a few months running BOINC/SETI at home which I had a hard time building for it from sources. The supply of suitable data sets dried up and that died too.

The Jetson Nano looks like a decent unit but here again, unless there is some development effort from those who have far greater knowledge than I do, the CUDA cores are likely to be a GoFaster bolt-on which will simply draw lots of current while not actually contributing anything useful.

Anybody out there know of any developments using CUDA cores for SDR? I imagine the effort required to do the functional decomposition to spread the processing over a number of cores would be immense. Would there be any advantage to such parallel processing as far as SDR was concerned? I haven’t seen any discussion on this subject on this reflector.

Just my 2 cents worth hoping to stimulate some discussion...

Cheers & 73

Chris G4NUX

(Like Sid Boyce a Microsoft free zone though some of my computing tasks are performed on Apple kit)


> On 29 Apr 2019, at 09:01, Shirley Márquez Dúlcey <mark at buttery.org> wrote:
> 
> ***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List *****
> 
> Cost. The Odroid is $79 with 4GB RAM (the only version currently
> available) and the NVidia is $99 if you can get one at list price.
> (Supply is currently limited and resellers that actually have stock
> are marking them up. You can get them at list price directly from
> NVidia but their shipping charges are higher than some other sources.)
> A Mini ITX motherboard plus an i7 CPU will cost much more. Even
> combining that motherboard with a cheap Intel processor like a Pentium
> will cost quite a bit more.
> 
> Some ballpark numbers (price reference: Newegg):
> Motherboard: $80 (Mini ITX isn't a bargain, Micro ATX can be had for around $55)
> Current i7 processor (i7-8700): $300
> Current Pentium processor (G4400, about to be discontinued): $65
> Alternate more recent Pentium processor (G5400): $75
> 4GB DDR4 RAM (one DIMM): $20
> 
> So even with the cheap processor it's $165, and the case and power
> supply are also going to be more costly than the ones for the single
> board computers.
> 
> The Jetson Nano looks really promising for DSP applications. Although
> its four Cortex A57 cores at 1.43 GHz are nothing special (the
> Odroid's four A73 cores at 1.8 GHz has that easily beat), the 128 CUDA
> compute units on the GPU offer massive floating point math capability.
> 
> On Sun, Apr 28, 2019 at 11:18 PM Scott Traurig <scott.traurig at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> ***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List *****
>> 
>> What is the advantage of these boards over simply using an i7 mini-ITX board?
>> 
>> 73,
>> 
>> Scott/w-u-2-o
>> 
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