Toshiba sticks SpursEngine in laptops
ELECTRONICS GIANT TOSHIBA has said that it will bung its SpursEngine multimedia processor into portable computers to enhance graphics and videos as well as various other applications.
Last week the company outlined its growth strategy for the coming year, noting that the SpursEngine had a significant part to play. By this, Toshiba meant that it planned to shove the SpursEngine into all its AV Qosmio (that name rings a bell... almost - sub ed) notebooks, which the company reckons will up the picture quality to High Definition (HD) standards, due to the cell-derivative processor.
The cell microprocessor, which was developed by by IBM, Toshiba and Sony back in 2001, has a hardware codec for HD encoding and decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 streams and four slave cores optimised for media streaming. The SpursEngine which integrates four high-performance RISC core SPEs, uses XDR DRAM memory, clocks at 1.6GHz, and only uses 10-20 watts. The SpursEngine (SE1000) reference board is apparently also compliant with PCI Express 1.1 x1 and x4 slots.
In computers the SpursEngine purportedly comes in quite handy when it comes to anything to do with processing multiple data streams including processing videos, performing physics computations and messing around with graphics.
Companies like Corel and Cyberlink have already said that their software supports the chip, and Toshiba reckons that the notebooks sporting them should be available already. ยต
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this is not news! you already reported this, and have provided a link to it at the bottom of the article. makes this one a bit redundant, no? not only that, but this article is not even correct. "The cell microprocessor, which was developed by by IBM, Toshiba and Sony back in 2001, has a hardware codec for HD encoding and decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 streams and four slave cores optimised for media streaming." no, it doesn't. the cell microprocessor developed in 2001 in whats in the ps3, among other things, and does not have any hardware decoder, and has 8 "slave cores" (although yes one is disabled in the ps3 chip). you're clealry describing the spursengine, which is obviously not the same thing. whats happened to the inq? you're recycling news, and not even getting the facts right!
To Louis: They are right http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/04/toshiba-spursengine.html it is a slim downed version of the CELL with 4 cores instead of 8.

There is no way they could put the full CELL in a laptop with heat yeilds etc so I would check on something before blasting off google is a nice friend sometimes.