Developments in GNU Radio
VOLK provides a way to access the vector (i.e., SIMD) instructions of general purpose processors. While there are other ways of doing this, a goal of GNU Radio is cross-platform support and an ease of programming and implementing new signal processing features. Until VOLK, adding SIMD code to GNU Radio had been a difficult, assembly-driven process. Instead, VOLK introduces the concept of a vector kernel to perform common mathematical functions in a cross-platform library. Over the next year, we will be improving many of the low-level signal processing blocks by using VOLK kernels instead of generic C++ code."