Intel Atom is NICE

GNU Radio
1

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

2

On Monday 29 December 2008 06:53:30 Bob McGwier wrote:

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).

Unfortunately the 945 chipset eats ~20W - god knows why Intel lumbered
the
Atom with it :frowning:

Toms Hardware (and others) did a test of the Atom vs an underclocked
Athlon
and the later won most of the tests

I think the Atom combo is cheaper and smaller though :slight_smile:

3

The intel graphics chip set and northbridge are power hungry. I think
the idea is optimize code for the 330 and not the peripherals with this
ine

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

4

On Monday 29 December 2008 21:41:03 Bob McGwier wrote:

The intel graphics chip set and northbridge are power hungry. I think the
idea is optimize code for the 330 and not the peripherals with this

I think that unfortunately the power consumption is high regardless of
wether
you actually use the video or not :frowning:

inexpensive and easy to use Mobo. The disk drive is hungry as well.

Well you could use an SSD :wink:

One does NOT need to spend thousands of dollars on an SDR computer for most
operations. That is a convenient excuse for me to justify my computer

I think the Athlon would be quite competitive, it has higher memory
bandwidth
I believe and the boards aren’t limited in connectivity like the Atom.

Basically my point was that it should be considered rather than just
assuming
the Atom is best :slight_smile:

5

Bob McGwier wrote:

One does NOT need to spend thousands of dollars on an SDR computer for most operations. That is a convenient excuse for me to justify my computer budget for “development” and get high end things to play with (so I can kill aliens from another galaxy or FSU laboratory with impressive graphics in my “spare time”). But most people need to really justify the need for the high end computer in my mind and they cannot. That is my point in all of this.

SDR wants to be on consumer/commodity level processors and SoC to be in everyone’s “coffee budget” and taken for granted in the ideal world in my book. There seems to be little gained by optimizing this for Quad core extreme processors with massive GPU’s sitting on them, tons of expensive high speed memory, and the world’s fastest drives and costing well upwards of $1000 US. Lightweight, easy to distribute, with browser level GUI’s and distributed everything on inexpensive processors and we rule the world. You can call me Dr. No. and SDR Working group chairman stands for SPECTRE DUMB RESEARCH working group.

While I can heartily agree that for the expansion of SDR into the
consumer space, you want it to run on low-power processors, etc, I can’t
agree that “for most operations” you don’t need a high-end CPU.

For example, 802.11 at anywhere approaching 802.11b bitrates needs some
serious iron, and yet in our world (the world of SDR
geeks), wanting to build SDR/GnuRadio-based 802.11b implementations
seems a fairly common goal.

In my work in radio astronomy, I’ve found that despite the relative
simplicity of the basic functions my software provides–full-bandwidth
spectral display, and total power, for one or two channels, big iron
is necessary. I recently upgraded to a quad-core Q6600 to replace
a dual-core Pentium D 940. The quad core loses against the dual-core
because of a difference in maximum clock speed. I can
run the D 940 at 3.2Ghz forever, and it can process a full 8Mhz of
dual-channel, complex bandwidth. The Q6600, on the other hand,
is unstable above 2.85Ghz or so, and can’t sustain more than about
5.3Mhz of dual-complex-channel bandwidth without incurring
massive USRP overruns.

Despite the wonderful new multi-threaded Gnu Radio framework, it seems
that at least one of those threads really needs as many
MIPs as the processor can throw at it, because it has to keep up with
a real-time data source.

Any time you’re dealing with having to suck in (or send out) as much
bandwidth as the USRP can tolerate, and
actually doing something with the entire bandwidth, you need
ManyMIPS™.
Which means spending $$$ (although, my dual/quad-core system was much
less than the $1000.00 you quote above).

–
Marcus L.
Principal Investigator, Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium

6

There are many more ways than just lumping everything onto a single GPP.
A good example is a recent thread on the GNU radio mailing list where
the poster is using the USRP2 as a standalone radio with no PC. Pushing
key elements to other reconfigurable processors, e.g. the USRP2 FPGA,
will greatly ease the burden of the GPP. My point is that “big iron”
isn’t always necessary if you’re willing to put some work into
distributing the work load to other processors (a major research issue
currently).

Tim

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-gnuradio-bounces+trnewman=removed_email_address@domain.invalid [mailto:discuss-gnuradio-
[email protected]] On Behalf Of Marcus D. Leech
Sent: Monday, December 29, 2008 8:14 AM
To: Bob McGwier
Cc: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; discuss-
[email protected]
Subject: Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Intel Atom is NICE.

7

The intel graphics chip set and northbridge are power hungry. I think
the idea is optimize code for the 330 and not the peripherals with this
inexpensive and easy to use Mobo. The disk drive is hungry as well.

The Intel ATOM Z500 family are mobile processors that have the same SIMD
registers, support LCD, good GigE support, and the potential wart
(POTENTIAL) is the 100 or 133 MHz FSB.

http://www.axiomtek.com.tw/Products/ViewProduct.asp?view=680#3

The Virginia Tech Mobile (SDR/CR) groups are looking at these (largest
SDR/CR department in the world I think).

I think we want to optimize SIMD code and see what we can get running on
these prepackaged, easy to get up and running systems as well as the SoC
parts such as that family of TI OMAP parts carried on the Beagleboard.

One does NOT need to spend thousands of dollars on an SDR computer for
most operations. That is a convenient excuse for me to justify my
computer budget for “development” and get high end things to play with
(so I can kill aliens from another galaxy or FSU laboratory with
impressive graphics in my “spare time”). But most people need to really
justify the need for the high end computer in my mind and they cannot.
That is my point in all of this.

SDR wants to be on consumer/commodity level processors and SoC to be in
everyone’s “coffee budget” and taken for granted in the ideal world in
my book. There seems to be little gained by optimizing this for Quad
core extreme processors with massive GPU’s sitting on them, tons of
expensive high speed memory, and the world’s fastest drives and costing
well upwards of $1000 US. Lightweight, easy to distribute, with
browser level GUI’s and distributed everything on inexpensive processors
and we rule the world. You can call me Dr. No. and SDR Working group
chairman stands for SPECTRE DUMB RESEARCH working group.

Cheers,
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

8

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

9

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

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

10

----- Start Original Message -----
Sent: Mon, 29 Dec 2008 22:53:06 -0500
From: “Eric A. Cottrell” [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Intel Atom is NICE.

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.

----- End Original Message -----

Hello,

I did not realize that the D945GCLF2 has the new Atom 330 dual core
processor. It should work even better than the earlier D945GCLF board or
netbook that I used.

73 Eric