Toshiba Demonstrates Cell Microprocessor

Cybro writes "Toshiba has demonstrated some cool applications for the Cell Microprocessor. They also revealed that they have written their own OS for the new processor. However the article on TechOn does not reveal the license of the OS."

Comments

Re:Thats Windows OS WMP

[KillerDeathRobot]

It's a video running in WMP of the videos running on Cell. Cell doesn't run WinXP.

Re:Thats Windows OS WMP

[KillerBob]

The article didn't say that Cell was doing the decoding live. Most likely, they recorded Cell/their OS doing the decoding straight to a TV screen, and were replaying the video of that on Windows Media Player.

Interesting but no mention of Transputer

[Morgaine]

I found it an interesting interview on several fronts, but it was slightly curious to me that he didn't mention the Inmos Transputer in his short review of the evolution of computing.

Of course, in such a brief summary you can't expect much detail, but the point about the Transputer was that it's the only relevant precursor to the Cell that has made it to market in a substantial way (there was a whole Transputer industry very active for most of a decade). Arbitrary-sized networks of small communicating hardware elements like Kutaragi envisages are nothing new to Transputer fans, and I'm sure that he knows it.

My guess is that he would prefer to leave the Transputer forgotten, because it introduced a paradigm that was way ahead of its time and it didn't catch on. (The fact that it was invented by Inmos in the UK instead of Intel in the US didn't help of course.)

The PR side of Kutaragi probably doesn't want to taint the Cell with any mention of past "revolutions" that fizzled out despite their supreme technical merits. I wish him great success though --- I'll certainly be buying a Cell-based PS3 the instant it comes out. :-)