HackRF Shell: Conversion to Floating Point

As expected, the bottle neck has disappeared at the floating point conversion. At least, I can say that I didn’t have trouble pulling 8 million samples per second (msps), which with 32 bit floating point (and 2 floating point numbers per sample) is 64 MB/sec. (I am short on time this evening, so I haven’t had a chance yet to try 20 msps.) As before, I fed the data into a Gnu Radio FM demodulator and got clean FM radio station audio out of it.

GCC 6.3 with -O3 appears to do some SSE optimization on the byte buffer to float buffer conversion:

christopher@nightshade:~/Repos/hackrf-shell$ objdump hackrf-shell -x -D | less
<snip>
    172c:       66 0f 6f c1             movdqa %xmm1,%xmm0
    1730:       66 0f 68 cc             punpckhbw %xmm4,%xmm1
    1734:       66 0f 60 c4             punpcklbw %xmm4,%xmm0
    1738:       66 0f 6f f1             movdqa %xmm1,%xmm6
    173c:       66 0f 65 e8             pcmpgtw %xmm0,%xmm5
    1740:       66 0f 6f f8             movdqa %xmm0,%xmm7
    1744:       66 0f 61 fd             punpcklwd %xmm5,%xmm7
    1748:       66 0f 69 c5             punpckhwd %xmm5,%xmm0
    174c:       66 0f 6f eb             movdqa %xmm3,%xmm5
    1750:       0f 5b ff                cvtdq2ps %xmm7,%xmm7
    1753:       66 0f 65 e9             pcmpgtw %xmm1,%xmm5
    1757:       0f 17 3c 24             movhps %xmm7,(%rsp)
<snip>

The next thing, perhaps, should be to create a little demo program where it captures the data at certain times of day. Or I could work on the next stages of an FM receiver, i.e., frequency multiplication, a low pass filter, and the FM demodulator.