Hey Joe,

On 15.08.2016 02:26, Joe D wrote:
> Referring to numerous papers and previous discussions, GNURadio
>  design is such as a block will run as fast as the CPU will allow it
>  (unless  limited by the source/sink front-end’s speed or introducing
> a Throttle Block.)
Exactly.
>
>  But practically how fast will it go, is there a known correlation
> with the CPU / machine specs that will allow to determine an upper
> limit of the maximum sampling rate for a given block?
>
Of course there's a general correlation that the faster your machine is,
the faster your algorithms finish doing their work, and the faster a
block will process the next chunk of work, and that is effectively
equivalent to a processing speed.
But no other statement can be made in general.

Obviously, things are very different for different classes of problems –
for example, a simple multiplicator is memory-bandwidth limited usually,
whereas an Eigenvector decomposition-based frequency estimator will be
CPU limited. The number of different blocks will have influence of how
the blocks can be scheduled, how much of their out/input stays in CPU
caches, the number, architecture and size of caches and RAM is of course
critical, just as much as your OS, etc.
>
>  Is there a documented / known empirical way to determine the specs of
> a machine (CPU /Cores /RAM)  based on the Maximum Sample per Second we
> would like to maintain? Taking into account the type/number of Blocks
> in the flowgraph
>
No; there can't be. The blocks do different things, and these different
things will work differently on different machines.

Really, this is the good old "benchmarking" problem: no benchmark can
represent all use cases of something that is effectively a library, and
the only meaningful measurement is that done on the system that you're
actually interested in, as soon as those systems hit a certain level of
complexity. Multi-core, speed-adaptive, RAM-caching architectures
running multi-threading applications on general-purpose operating
systems definitely are something that hit that level of complexity.

Best regards,
Marcus
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