RE: [Discuss-gnuradio] UC professor says SW radio a bad idea

[Ettus, Matt]

Anybody looking for good Mops per milliwatt numbers with SDR is barking up
the wrong tree.  SDR is about rapid design and prototyping, flexibility, and
future-proofing.


> function architectures using large amounts of parallelism offered the 
> highest efficiency - in terms of millions of operations per 
> second (Mops) 
> per milliwatt - per unit area of silicon. His thesis was based on an 
> examination of the processors presented at ISSCC over the 
> past 20 years. 
> The software-intensive general-purpose processors with high 
> clock rates 
> faired the worst in terms of Mops accomplished per milliwatt, 
> he said. DSPs 
> with parallel math operations show a more efficient use of 
> current and 
> voltage, or more Mops per mW. But the most efficient 
> semiconductor devices 
> - those demonstrating four orders of magnitude efficiency 
> improvement - 
> were dedicated processors for MPEG-2 and 802.11 decoding. 
> Such reasoning 
> rules against a general-purpose processor - and software-intensive 
> operations - for portable systems. "The software radio is a 
> really bad 
> idea," Brodersen concluded.