Toshiba's new laptops get all video minded

TOSH has been jacking its new quad-core SpursEngine chip under the bonnet of its laptop range in a bid to improve the quality of Internet video images.

The new range of Qosmio multimedia laptops are set to be unveiled in Japan with the graphics processing chip tuned to clean up video from sites such as YouTube.
Users will have to play a video fullscreen using Internet Exploder, although Tosh can't say why it will not work with other browsers.

The SpursEngine is based on the Cell Broadband Engine microprocessor and is a cut down version containing only four of the SPE cores.

It has a hardware encoder and decoder for MPEG2 and MPEG4 AVC/H.264 video and is designed to be co-processor. In the Qosmio machines it works alongside an Intel Core2 Duo processor.

We have seen the SpursEngine chip but cleaning up video before, only then it was only DVD playback and not streamed content.

Tosh says that there will be an international launch of the Qosmio machines one day. µ

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