Toshiba presents Qosmio Notebook equipped with Cell Co-Processor

Within the barrage of new and boring video players at CEATEC2007, Toshiba demoed today a Qosmio laptop equipped with their new SpursEngine. The SpursEngine is a processor loaded with four Cell Broadband Engine cores-called Synergistic Processing Elements-the same technology inside the PS3. The new processor, which also has MPEG-2 and H.264 encoding/decoding units, is designed to handle images and video bypassing the CPU or the graphic card, doing all sorts of magic to it, like real-time face recognition of video streams, like they showed in their demo:

[fury]

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lol j/k

[ShiftyLookingCow]

it will be weird if these laptops were also equipped with HD-DVD drives

[WilliamRLBaker]

id be funny as hell and would prove the whole war is stupid and they should just stop, get together make a unified amazing format, and then phase out hd dvd and blu ray together and make the new discs playable on both hd dvd and bluray players so early adoptors dont feel left out.

[Shankle]

And then join hands under the rainbow and sing kumbaya!

[gerrard]

Warner already tried that with total hd disc(works with both Bluray and HD DVD)and was rejected by both sides.

[Grinchy]

Does that mean it costs loads, full of promise, then falls flat!? lol?
yes i am an Arsenal supporter

[Bonsai1214]

i got the reference instantly. and was actually going to make a joke about it, but you beat me to it..

[jackie chann]

Is this going to out perform a quad core?

[DJ]

If they manage to do OpenGL acceleration with the SpursEngine, I may actually look into getting a Toshiba PC. Right now I'm shopping for computers that can handle my render workload.

[socomnick]

Open gl ? I though the standard was directx 10 :/

[Ju]

I was actually thinking the same. It could help a lot with spu specific coding, shaders etc. They didn't say what it will cost, though, did they ?

[ShiftyLookingCow]

I thought both OpenGL and DX have working implementations only on dedicated cards, yeah I know there is stuff like MesaGL that works on "software mode" but they are nowhere near as fast or powerful.

[DJ]

It offers greater performance than DirectX, and I don't have to do any programming so it works out great. Lightwave 9.3 finally uses GPU acceleration, so I have to get a good GPU if I want to keep up.

[BlazinEurasian]

Will this start to become the norm, will it have a niche or will it fade?

[jeanm3306]

that's good for sony. price cut coming soon. the more demand of the cell the lower the price will be.

[Ju]

Well, that's actually not a cell. It is a custom chip which uses 4 SPU building blocks. I doubt this will have an effect on CELL cpus produced. But it is great to develop SPU code...one thing would be interesting to know is: does it have the same DMA interface like the CELL ?

[jaja1434]

Ouch I would hate to see the price of that laptop.

So I don't know to much about the cell but it seems to me that the chip requires lots of power. If thats true, wouldn't this be a bad idea for a laptop? But as I said I really don't know to much about it so I could be wrong.

[MikeGdaGod]

does this mean it has four out of eight of the SPE's that's in the PS3?

[DJ]

As far as I know, there's no EIB ring in this chip, but it's still pretty awesome. I guess they're doing baby steps into the PC market, which is smart.

[neogeo]

No. The wonderful thing about the cell is it uses low power and low heat. It won't cost very much. This is also good news for Sony because they make the cell. More cell's= lower cost over time.