Toshiba Announces Cell Based Laptop
Toshiba has announced that it expects to begin selling notebooks equipped with its SpursEngine graphics chip later this year. The SpursEngine chip is based on the technology that powers the PlayStation 3 gaming console’s Cell processor.
Toshiba’s management said it will put its SpursEngine SE1000 chip into multimedia-oriented notebooks - probably the company’s flagship Qosmio G40 - during 2008. The SpursEngine SE1000 packs in four of Cell’s Synergistic Processing Element (SPE) cores. Cell has up to eight SPEs to handle vector data, along with a PowerPC-based general purpose computing core for everything else.
Each SPE is a SIMD RISC processor specialising in single- and double-precision floating point maths. The SE1000 also has a memory controller on board that links the SPEs to 128MB of Rambus XDR memory over a bus capable of pushing data at 12.8GB/s.
The chip is capable of MPEG 2 and H.264 encoding and decoding at 1080p full HD resolution, and those are the applications it’s pitching the product at rather than 3D graphics. Toshiba has previously announced it’s partnering with the likes of CyberLink, Leadtek and Corel - all makes of widely used PC-oriented video playback apps - to add support for the SE1000 to their software.
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