Toshiba stuffs Cell in uber-laptop

THE FIRST CELL-ENABLED LAPPIE, the Tosh Qosmio G55-802, has come to be. After having announced sampling back in April, it appears Tosh is confident enough they’ll be raking in the millions (of yen, shorely) with their new range of Qosmio uber-laptops.

Being hosed with the “Toshiba Quad HD Processor” marchitecture will give you about a two-second hesitation period before common sense kicks in. The new lappies will actually be powered by Intel’s P7350 Core 2 Duo processor, while the much-gabbed “SpursEngine” Cell-based processor is reserved for HD video processing (encoding and decoding) providing a bunch of nice little features that look like they were stolen from a PS3 game.

The Quad Core HD processor is a 4-SPU Cell B.E. unit working at 1.5GHz that does all the H.264 and MPEG-2 encoding/decoding onboard. This allows you to do the more common stuff like outputting HD video with little strain to the system (although the G55’s 9600M GT should do equally well), but it also allows you to do encoding. In other words, you can dump gigabytes of video from your HD video camera to your PC and edit it with little effort and do stuff like face recognition and motion detection (resorting to the integrated webcam). This last one would allow you to remote control your media experience by simply waving your hand about. The Spurs Engine will also allow you to do Upconvert and Upconversion. Said feature, according to Tosh, means taking a standard-res DVD and upscale the pixels to glorious 720p video, supposedly with great results.

The Qosmio’s Cell processor is different from the PS3 one as it sports less SPUs and a 32-bit controller chip instead of the main processing unit. It comes as an add-in mini PCIe 1x card that slots into your DTR lappie, while the PS3 everything is onboard. Potentially you could stick this into any computer with an available mini-PCIe slot and get the extra kick out of your video experience, but so far you’re limited to Tosh’s lappies (If you want to look at the specs on the SpursEngine you can go here, by teh way.)

Although it is inevitably a DTR laptop, where battery life is more akin to that of a PC hooked to a UPS, the massive Qosmio G55-802 (and any “Toshiba Quad Core HD processor”-enabled laptop, for that matter) will take an even greater hit to its battery life as the official Tosh paperwork states a 10-20w power consumption for the SE1000 chip alone. Phwoarr.

The Qosmio G55-802 also features 4GB of DDR2-800, dual 250GB HDDs, an 18.4-inch display (1680x945!), Nvidia 9600M GT graphics, Bluetooth, webcam, microphone, gigabit LAN, a horde of software, i.Link (FireWire), Regza Link and a $1550 price tag. Giggle-prone readers will find that Tosh can’t spell its own name, twice in the same page, very amusing.

The unusual 1680x945 resolution preserves the 16:9 viewing ratio, but might sound strange under Windows. Tosh has dubbed this as “HD+” resolution, although it’s neither 720p, 1080i nor 1080p. Just a little bit more marketingese going on, we guess…

In the end you’ve got a 10.8lbs laptop that’s almost the size of your TV, using a super-powered chip that kills your battery, decodes HD (does the 9600M GT not have PureVideo HD?), and uses a non-standard screen resolution that isn’t your usual HD format, but it *is* 16:9… what could possibly confuse consumers? µ