The Cell Broadband Processor, jointly developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM, is the driving force behind the PlayStation 3 and high-end blade servers. While the chip is mainly used as a CPU in existing applications, Toshiba is planning to extend the Cell Brodband Engine’s base technology into graphics.

Toshiba’s specialized version of the technology, dubbed “SpursEngine,” will utilize similar Synergistic Processing Element (SPE) cores as found in the Cell/B.E.

The SpursEngine will only include four SPE cores, rather than the full eight cores of the Cell/B.E. chip. New to Toshiba’s own chip will be dedicated hardware for decoding and encoding MPEG-2 and H.264 video.

“By combining the high level, real time processing software of the SPEs with the hardware video codecs, the SpursEngine realizes an optimized balance of processing flexibility and low power consumption,” Toshiba wrote in its press release.

The prototype of SpursEngine operates at a clock frequency of 1.5GHz and consumes power at 10 to 20 watts. In contrast, the Cell/B.E. processor found inside every PlayStation 3 operates at 3.2GHz. Like the PlayStation 3, however, the SpursEngine will also make use of Rambus XDR DRAM as working memory.

In its announcement, Toshiba said that it would demonstrate at the CEATEC JAPAN 2007 conference its new chip in action inside notebook PC, showing off “the processor's capabilities in 3D image processing and manipulation: real-time transformations of hair styles and makeup that instantaneously recognize and process changes in position, angle, and facial expression, and render them as computer graphics.”

Toshiba’s decidedly lower-cost take on the existing Cell/B.E. hint that the SpursEngine will find into more than just PCs. Toshiba may one day use its SpursEngine way in its mainstream consumer electronics devices, such as its HD DVD players.

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This would be very awesome if they can incorporate this into video cards, just imagine the possibilities and what kind of graphics it could produce. I think it would be quite a step forward and allow for many new and realistic games to be produced.

not good.

If cell makes it into mainstream PCs I want it doing regular CPU tasks as well as GPU tasks.

True that is a good point, it could put an end to the vid card market if that happens.

I will go with what d4rk said...

Looks pretty snazzy.

Sounds, looks same thing