Toshiba Uses Cell Chip In Consumer Laptop

An anonymous reader sends us to CNET UK's Crave blog, where they report on a demo from CES. So far the only uses for Cell chips have been research stuff and the PS3. Now Toshiba has put a Cell chip into a consumer laptop; they are calling it the Spurs Engine. "The system was demonstrated in modified Qosmio G45 laptops, each of which uses a standard Intel Core 2 Duo CPU in addition to a Cell chip with four 1.5GHz synergistic processing elements (SPEs). Toshiba had four demos running... Demo 3... scans all your movie files, recognizes faces, and creates thumbnails of those faces. You can then click the thumbnails to watch scenes with those faces in, or compile them in a separate playlist."

Comments

ahh so many uses

[Anonymous Coward]

how much will this get used to just play that one scene for your final porn watching ending?

How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[Bert64]

A good PPC laptop using a Cell as it's main processor would be good, not just a hybrid using one as a co-processor...

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[Anonymous Coward]

The primary core is kind of crappy compared to a typical processor so unless you rewrite your OS and software to use the SPEs it won't perform very well.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[F-3582]

Because the consumer wants to run Microsoft Windows and applications made for Microsoft Windows on it. You can't just compile an entire software catalog to PPC within a week. However, this could "Spur" the development of applications for the Cell running on Windows and with growing adoption Microsoft might even start porting some of its own libraries. History might be in the making. Watch it unfold.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[TeknoHog]

IIRC, the Cell uses way too much power for sensible laptop use. I'm waiting for PWRficient instead -- 2 GHz PPC at max 7 W per core.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[foniksonik]

Maybe it's better suited to be a co-processor.... not all technology is meant to be the main component, sometimes it's better to let it specialize, as long as the bus between the CPU and the Co-PU is fast enough all is good. GPUs are this way and have been a great success.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Yeah, they were SO serious about NT on Alpha ;-)

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[sconeu]

Don't forget PPC and MIPS (NT4 was released for those platforms aw well).

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[LWATCDR]

Actually for a long time Microsoft wrote NT on the MIPS and ported to Intel. They felt that if they didn't portability would suffer. Microsoft was actually pretty serious about NT on the Alpha, MIPS, and PPC for a long while. The problem was that nobody else was. Windows developers tended to write for Win95 because that was the big market and many users of the MIPS, Alpha, and PPC where sticking with Unix since they felt it was a better server.
Microsoft finally just gave up since 99.9% of there users where on Intel.
Since Intel and AMD have pretty much killed the Alpha and MIPS on servers it worked out well for them.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[ChunderDownunder]

Yes it's unlikely from a commercial perspective while Windows, historically tied to x86(64), dominates.

But... Linux works. Supposing they can get the power consumption to reasonable levels, it could theoretically be a candidate CPU for a future OLPC, which already runs Linux, especially given the fallout with Intel. Given Toshiba are using the Cell as a co-processor in addition to a regular CPU, I figure they must have revolutionary battery technology around the corner!

Then there's Apple. With universal binaries, and technologies such as Rosetta, OS X is processor agnostic. If the figures from the article are to be believed, there's an outside chance. The potential performance gains may be compelling for Apple's key 'professional user' category, i.e. multimedia creation.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[Anonymous Coward]

no it wouldn't. The Cell sucks as a general purpose processor. It's in order and not designed to handle workloads the average person uses. It really is only good as a specific purpose processor.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thoshiba is coming up with a great design. You can now have the best of both worlds - existing apps on x86 and new interesting stuff on Cell. So far the only way to get a Cell processor is PS3. Unfortunately it only has 256M rambus memory - too expensive and too little capacity to do anything interesting.

The PC design has stuck in a rut for too long. Things are cheap but BORING! Hopefully Thoshiba will commercialize this, both in laptop and desktop format. Can't wait to buy one.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[sgt scrub]

Developers at Digital, on alpha machines, did the leg work on NT so it would work on 32 and 64 systems. I guess after IBM stopped giving them code, via OS/2, they had to find someone to do the work for them.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[Doc Ruby]

The PS3 has a Cell with a (2-thread, 3.2GHz) PPC core and 7 (not just 3-4) SPUs, and runs Linux. It's not a laptop, and its Cell is different (includes PPC) than the SpursEngine, but it's a good reference for comparison to this x86/Cell hybrid.

The main benefit that you can see from this comparison is that the x86/Cell hybrid can run Windows, so it will sell more (and to more developers). Which means more Cell SW than the niche (and also crippled by Sony's Hypervisor and hardwired small RAM) PS3. A laptop wouldn't have the RAM and Hypervisor limits, but the Windows advantage is really cool. I like the idea of having the multiple x86 and Cell horsepower all in one PC. I'd like to see a real Cell with x86 under Linux, so we can get these multiprocessors into developers' hands and get a good API cooked up. In fact, since Cell is inherently multiprocessing (and multi-Cell is really a major architecture feature), I'd like to see a multicore x86 and several Cells. And then see what kind of SW we can extend from existing Windows and Linux to exploit it.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[CrazedWalrus]

If these prove useful, maybe they can put the thing right on the die with the main CPU. Can't get much faster.

I'm no hardware engineer, so I don't know the technical challenges involved. Otherwise, I guess they'd have to work out some licensing agreement so Intel/AMD can fab these. Doesn't seem impossible if there's a market for it.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[peragrin]

Not only did developers at digital do the leg work, Alpha machines that were to run windows NT had to have special co processor to convert the NT code into Alpha instructions.

this I know for a fact as I have held in my hands an Alpha Motherbaord and have seen the clearly labeled chip for MSFT NT compatibility.

I took the unit apart for fun. the 256MB ram cards were bigger than the laptop I am writing this on.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Was it a co processor or an NT specific PALCODE bios chip?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PALcode

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[turgid]

Microsoft was actually pretty serious about NT on the Alpha, MIPS, and PPC for a long while. The problem was that nobody else was.

That's right. All of those platforms already had far superior operating systems. PeeCee users, on the other hand, effectively only had DOS and 16-bit Windows, so NT looked like a godsend.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[LWATCDR]

The 386 did have Unix even then. There where versions of Unix for the 286 for goodness sakes.
But lets face it. Are you going to spend the money for a MIPS or Alpha to recompile and test a program that you may or may not sell?
Are you going to buy an OS that doesn't have any software to speak of and my never?
NT dies on those CPUs for the same reason that BeOS died on Intel.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[FunkyELF]

Do you have anything to back that up?
The Cell in a PS3 a 3.2GHz PPC, enough to run an OS on without using the SPEs.
Any use of SPEs by the OS would just make it faster.
Not sure what use an OS would have for them though, they're really for the uerland multimedia apps or anything else using SIMD.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[rbanffy]

"You can't just compile an entire software catalog to PPC within a week"

You can recompile an entire software catalog for PPC. It's done routinely by the folks at almost all major Linux distros.

I would love a 100% windows-proof notebook.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alpha has been killed by HP in favour of the Itanic (Itanium)

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[chasd]

Actually for a long time Microsoft wrote NT on the MIPS and ported to Intel.

The first time I saw Windows NT run it was on a MIPS computer.

Microsoft was actually pretty serious about NT on the Alpha, MIPS, and PPC for a long while.

The way I remember it, IBM was in charge of the PPC version, and they had a very difficult time getting it out the door. There were rumors that some at IBM wanted PPC OS/2 to ship before PPC Windows NT, and that was the stumbling block.

Microsoft finally just gave up since 99.9% of there users where on Intel. Since Intel and AMD have pretty much killed the Alpha and MIPS on servers it worked out well for them.

The way I remember it, DEC was doing all the development for Alpha Windows NT. When Compaq bought DEC, they said WTF and cut back on the resources for Alpha Windows NT. Then, Compaq found out that Microsoft was using the work done by DEC / Compaq to make an Itanium ( 64-bit ) port of WIndows NT, Compaq fired all of the enginners working on Alpha Windows NT and told Microsoft it was on it's own. Microsoft dropped Alpha support soon after.

So Microsoft really only did x86 development, and twisted the arms of its "partners" to provide support for other processors.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[neomunk]

I may be reading the PWRficient material wrong (I didn't look too hard honestly) but I think you're comparing apples to Volkswagons here.

The WHOLE POINT of the cell isn't the PPC goodness, it's the vector lovins inside that make multimedia apps scream. Vector processors make certain floating point calculations (like anything trying to model real life: videos, pictures, sounds and so forth) unbelievably fast. Another regular ole' PPC is just a competing product, not a NEW CLASS of product, meant for a slightly different (though perfectly synergistic(sorry buzz word)) purpose.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[Wdomburg]

Being able to run an OS is hardly a feat. Processors have been doing that for decades. :)

There's numerous documents detailing the design behind the Cell, though. As IBM puts it "the key design goals of the PPE are to maximize the performance/power ratio as well as the performance/area ratio." In other words the PPE wasn't optimized for raw performance, which is pretty obvious from the specs - only two execution units, no branch prediction, small caches.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[Hamilton Lovecraft]

The PS3 doesn't run Linux; the development tools provided by Sony are Linux-based. This is a common misconception dating back from the PS2 days. "Cell" isn't really the PPC core anyway, and the PPC CPU in the PS3 is outperformed by any current Intel offering.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[Bri3D]

That's not a coprocessor. Old Alphas just needed a different BIOS with ARC support for compatibility. Later AlphaServers supported NT out-of-the-box with no labelled chip, custom BIOS, or differences at all from OpenVMS/OSF/1 or Linux support. I know this because I have an AlphaServer 4/266 running NT right now.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[Hamilton Lovecraft]

The PPC core in the PS3 is pretty basic, executes only in-order, and can probably be outperformed by a Core 2 at 2.4GHz. You wouldn't gain anything by going PPC/Cell instead of Intel/Cell, and you'd lose Windows compatibility.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[Hamilton Lovecraft]

What, someone's going to break into your house in the middle of the night and install XP on your machine? Grow up.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[Wdomburg]

This isn't the Cell that ships in a PS3. It's a derived design with four SPEs and hardware MPEG encode/decode. The prototype draws 10-20W @ 1.5GHz and production versions would doubtless be more efficient than that.

The PWRficient isn't comparible. That's a general purpose processor. This is a co-processor that doesn't even implement a PPC instruction set.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[Wdomburg]

So far the only way to get a Cell processor is PS3.

Not true

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[default luser]

IIRC, the Cell uses way too much power for sensible laptop use.

Apparently, you do not know how CMOS devices work. The power consumption of the chip is directly proportional to the capacitive load and the frequency, and is proportional to the square of the voltage.

Concering only the SPE power consumption, which is the majority of power used by a Cell chip:

If x represents the power consumption of a 7-SPE chip running at 3.2 GHz...

If you cut the number of SPEs from 7 to 4, your capacitive load is cut to %57 of the original, or 0.57 * x.

If you again cut the frequency from 3.2 GHz to 1.5 GHz, you get a power consumption reduction of 1.5 / 3.2. Your total power consumption after capacitive load and frequency changes is 0.26 * x.

The PPE portion of the chi[p will see power consumption reduced by half because of frequency.

FINALLY: a reduced operating frequency means you can reduce the voltage, and this is where you can see some impressive gains. Just to get an idea of the differences in voltages, here is a link to a voltage vs speed graph for each SPE, from Sony engineers. You could potentially operate the Cell at 1.5 GHz at a very low threshold voltage, giving you a %20-30 reduced power consumption.

So, after all that, you have a chip that runs on less than %20 of the power of its big brother (estimated 60-80w), so this chip is around 10-15w, which is quite practical for four 128-bit vector processors plus a PPE.

Not that there's anything the Cell could really do effectively for a PC. For parallel processing, we already have dual 128-bit SSE units on the Core2 Duo processors, which comes within fighting range of four SPEs clocked at a paltry 1.5 GHz. And of course, most of there pipe-dream uses will get held-back by slow I/O on a home computer or laptop (like ALL the examples uses for this chip listed in the article), so there's really no need for all that processing power.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[Doc Ruby]

I don't know where you're getting that. The PS3 I have 10 feet away from me certainly does run Linux. I have Ubuntu installed on it for almost a year, as do many others, and other distros, too (including the YDL that is Sony's official recommendation).

FWIW, the PS2 also installed Linux for general purpose computing on any PS2, too, not just a closed Sony dev environment. I was a member of that community, too, but waited until no additional HW (ie. nonstandard hard drive and ethernet) were required. The PS3 meets those requirements, and delivers.

The PS3's 3.2GHz PPE contains a 64-bit PPC and an AltiVec accelerator. That chip outperforms many Intel chips, especially at the same price. Meanwhile, there is already substantial SPE development, including HD movie playback and X drivers already in use.

So really it looks like you don't know what you're talking about at all.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[rbanffy]

No.

I would love it because it would be different. Better at certain things (the Cell is a very respectable number-cruncher), worse at others (playing Windows games, perhaps), but would push the envelope in directions x86 processors won't because x86 machines are built, mainly, to run Windows.

There are a lot of very cool processors around, like the Octeon (8 MIPS cores) or the Niagara 2 or the Cell that would, certainly, end up being the cores of very interesting computers.

I would love to see a multi-core ARM 11 with lots of cache and a GPU-like appendage for heavy number-crunching. It would be low power, fast and could easily run most programs I use daily.

Laptops could be smaller, batteries could last longer. What people has done with the EeePC and the XO doesn't even scratch what could be done with non-x86 architectures.

And yes. I have outgrown Windows. Windows was cool back in the 90s, but Free Software allows us to experiment with computers in ways we couldn't since the late 70s and early 80s. That's why I am not going back.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[cgenman]

The bigger your main die, the bigger % of chips need to be thrown out at the fab plant due to impurities in the manufacturing process. That lowers yield exponentially, and drives up price. At some point you have to split things off into separate chips or else your manufacturing output effectively falls to zero.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[Pikoro]

I still have the MSDN Beta 2 disc for windows 2000 that supports mips and PPC. Had it running on one of my Alpha boxen here, but all of the "put content of this dialog box" messages basically made it unusable.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[donaldm]

Alpha has been killed by HP in favour of the Itanic (Itanium) No Compaq put the knife in and pushed the body in a hole, HP is just filling in the hole. The reason why the hole has not be fully filled in is those annoying arms keep popping up.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[ozmanjusri]

At some point you have to split things off into separate chips or else your manufacturing output effectively falls to zero.

That's not what history tells us.

The original 8086 had 29,000 transistors. Modern Core 2 processors have about 300,000,000 transistors.

Quad and eight core designs are already in their roadmaps, so if there's competitive advantage to embedding the equivalent of a Cell in an X86, Intel and/or AMD will find a way of doing it.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[tzot]

I would love to see a multi-core ARM 11 with lots of cache and a GPU-like appendage for heavy number-crunching. It would be low power, fast and could easily run most programs I use daily.
I totally agree. The EeePC and the XO could both have an ARM processor. If only no-one (esp. ASUS) cared for compatibility with the Wintel world...

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[dave87656]

For some types of users - those who use their laptop for email, wp, internet - having a low power chip and small footprint would be an advantage. Running an OS other than windows for that purpose, especially if it has a small memory footprint and quick boot times would play into that scenario very well.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[John Jamieson]

If you have been following the Cell processor, you know it the main core would probubly place between a P3 and an Athlon 1600(and likely closer to the P3).
Sure that can run an OS, but using that many transistors to run an OS is not ideal(olpc does this much more efficently).

Where the cell would be nice is in specialty laptops. Used as a secondary processor you would have a laptop powerhouse.
As long as you could tack on the inputs and outputs, you would be able to be a PVR recording 20 channels at once, replace huge multimedia consoles or replace a large recording studio--- All on a laptop.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[cgenman]

You'll notice that with the 8 core cell processors on the PS3, only 7 are available to the console. This is because, to increase yield, one is assumed dead and burned off (instead of having to throw the entire chip out). This is only possible because each of the cores are identical... separate use chips on the same die lack this redundancy.

I'd guess we're looking at a situation where more identical cores become more and more common, but separate chips-on-die are out. They just create too many potentially fatal points of failure in the manufacturing process.

Of course, some day we may discover how to make these things without any failures after the initial mask. When that day comes, we'll probably see the entire computer on a chip.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[Gideon Fubar]

Why limit this to laptops?

I'd like to see something like AMD's cHT system become standard.. being able to drop various x86/PPC/Cell CPUs onto the same desktop or server motherboard would be excellent.

Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop?

[John Jamieson]

You are so right, especially since that would open new avenues for add in boards in the PCIx16 slots.

A consumer Laptop

[Bruiser80]

Or is this a demo piece of hardware crammed in a consumer laptop box?

An intel dual core processor (2) with a cell processor (4)

...but does it run linux? (couldn't resist)

Re:A consumer Laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it can run linux.

A professor at my university has has setup a cluster of PS3 last year. It runs Fedora Core 5 Linux ppc64.
http://moss.csc.ncsu.edu/~mueller/cluster/ps3/

Those poor batteries

[jeremy128]

My only concern with putting a chip like that in a laptop would be the batteries (it uses a lot of juice, doesn't it?). 15 minute battery lives, here we come. Also, remember the thing about exploding laptop batteries? I don't think this is a very good idea.

Really kinda cool

[LWATCDR]

Seem like it would be really handy to put something like this on a video card. You could use it for physics modeling, effects, anything else the SPEs are good at.
Since this is a lot slower than the PS3 I have to wonder when the first hand recognition based games and controls will be available on the PS3. The EyeToy should work just fine for those.

Re:Really kinda cool

[mweather]

They released hand recognition based games the same day they released the Playstation Eye.

Re:Really kinda cool

[LWATCDR]

Are they any good? Have they managed to use them for controling the DVD player yet? Seems like it could be kind of neat if it worked well. I don't have a PS3 so I have little experience with it.
So far I haven't seen anything that I think is really must have on the PS3. All the demos I have seen are just very pretty but very normal games.

Re:Really kinda cool

[Chrisq]

But infringed the SCO copyright on "body part recognition games". The legal team distinctly remember the very challenging original release, where they had to distinguish "arse" and "elbow" graphics.

Re:Really kinda cool

[Slashcrap]

Seem like it would be really handy to put something like this on a video card.

Yeah, I bet it would be nearly as good as current video cards. You might want to ask yourself why the PS3 has that Nvidia chip in it.

Re:Really kinda cool

[LWATCDR]

I meant in addition to the GPU not instead of.

Re:Really kinda cool

[avandesande]

You know the saying 'if you think of something it has probably already been done'

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/06/19/can_ageia/

Re:Really kinda cool

[Redbaran]

I don't think you really need to wait to do that. Some of what you are talking about is already possible. You might want to look up NVIDIA's CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). It essentially allows you to run C programs on the video card.

It's also important to note that an NVIDIA 8800GTX has somewhere between 200-300 GFLOPS of power, which IIRC is about what the Cell has too. By comparison, I think a Core 2 Quadro has something like 50 GFLOPS. So, if raw processing power is what you are after, CUDA is something you might want to look into. Unfortunately, I only have minimal experience with it and have not tried to run both a game engine and a CUDA program at the same time, so I don't know how well you could swap back and forth between the two.

The NVIDIA has also guaranteed that CUDA will run on all future boards, so anything that's a Gefore 8XXX and later should run your CUDA program. I know some of the Quadro and "workstation" boards also run CUDA, but I can't recall which models.


*I have seen different GFLOPs reported for the 8800GTX, with an NVIDIA provided graph stating ~300GFLOPS (I think). This article stats that it has 512 GFLOPS of power: http://www.digital-daily.com/video/geforce_8800/index03.htm

Re:Really kinda cool

[TheRaven64]

You might want to look up NVIDIA's CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). It essentially allows you to run C programs on the video card. In this context, 'essentially' hides a lot of details. You can program them in C, but you are still targeting an architecture which is basically four 32-way SMP stream processors. Taking a random C program and compiling it will give terrible performance.

Dreaming

[explosivejared]

As with all things cool, Spurs is not yet available to consumers, and may never actually come to market. But it's fun to dream.

It's also fun to dream that vaporware may one day not be the staple feature of Slashdot. I would love to see the day where I don't have to be so cynical about new products I see on Slashdot because I trust in its availability. Like the man said... it's fun to dream.

You sonuvabitch!

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet you're the jackass editor who keeps putting clips of close ups of just faces in my porn. You better hope I, and a soon to be gigantic and bloodthirsty mob, don't find where you live! I knew you'd slip up one day, you bastard.

Just two letters short of...

[kernspaltung]

the Spurious Engine! And maybe now malware purveyors will learn how to program for the Cell (since nobody else has), leaving your Core Duo free to run the browser that's being hijacked and a few UAC dialogs.

Re:Just two letters short of...

[Constantine XVI]

Spurs = 5

Spurious = 8

8 - 5 = 3

Re:Just two letters short of...

[koh]

Just two letters short of... the Spurious Engine! "Spurs" is two letters short of "Spurious" in your world? Are you using Excel or something?

Re:Just two letters short of...

[kernspaltung]

Obviously, I'm in dire need of this new laptop and its awesome computational capability.

NSA will find this usefull.

[AltGrendel]

Toshiba had four demos running... Demo 3... scans all your movie files, recognizes faces, and creates thumbnails of those faces. You can then click the thumbnails to watch scenes with those faces in, or compile them in a separate playlist.

Just change those movies to security camera feeds and there you go!

Possibly quite literally!

Re:NSA will find this usefull.

[Firefalcon]

...and you think they haven't already done that?

While they might not be using cell type processors, you can bet they have some kick-arse (or -ass as they are American) hardware with custom software written for just that purpose.

Re:NSA will find this usefull.

[stephen70]

The posibilities are staggering - toshibas 4 demos are the tip of an iceberg - how about optical collision avoidance for vehicles, and as mentioned security apps. I love the idea of the hand gestures for remote control of video will never need to search behind the sofa for the lost remote control again. Why just be putting this into a laptop though, imageine the benefit of this gesture remote control system for a media player, with a short intro anyone can use it, with a low light camera it would be easier to use gestures than trying to read the inscriptions on the tiny buttons of my current remote in the dark. The STI Cell is a future technology today - the performance /power /cost ratios of this chip archecture are remarkable. Also these maimed CELL chips with just 4 SPE's probably cost nothing they are rejects from PS3 and other STI-CELL users who want only premium 7 or 8 SPE CELL chips. At 1.5Ghz a 4SPU STI cell can do 50Giga Flops using under 10watts so Toshiba can put them and other very advanced functionallity into equipment without adding much to the price, size, weight, heat generation or the power consumption of them. The 1080p upscaller application is remarkable use of this technology current DVD upscallers are pretty much a joke ( thay just use single frame linear interpolation basically they do very little to improve image quality) , though i think the toshiba upscaller demo is probably a huge step forward, it wont get the full 1080p back but it's trying.

Demo 3...

[L4t3r4lu5]

"... scans all your movie files, recognizes faces, and creates thumbnails of those faces. You can then click the thumbnails to watch scenes with those faces in, or compile them in a separate playlist." So Sony have created a chip and software combo which rips all the spooge scenes out of your pr0n? Classy.

Re:Demo 3...

[BiggerIsBetter]

It'll be Japanese market only, but mandatory for real-time censoring of porn with unpixelated genitalia.

Re:Demo 3...

[SirLoadALot]

The summary only mentions Demo 3. Here are the others:

Demo 1 is the lonely Demo of all.

Demo 2 is a brute force MD5 cracker, so Toshiba can screw up SquirrelMail for reals next time.

Demo 4 works the same as Demo 3, but replace "face" with "nipple".

Demo 5 scans your music collection for Paris Hilton and, if found, e-mails your entire address book to let them know how bad you suck.

We don't talk about Demo 6.

Demo 7 burns with the rage of a thousand suns.

Demo 8 performs MPEG2 compression in both little and big endian -- just 'cause.

Demo 9 remixes all your audio files with samples from the Captain Picard song.

Demo 10 indexes your porn by hair colour.

Re:Demo 3...

[Anonymous Coward]

Demo 10 indexes your porn by hair colour.

Via the hair on the head, or down below? Or Preferably both!

Re:Demo 3...

[xSauronx]

Demo 10 indexes your porn by hair colour.

Which hair?

Re:Demo 3...

[HR]

Which hair?

With most of today's porn stars, there is only one possibility.

SPURS ?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

The dirtiest chip in the NB^H^H^H Industry.

Does it run Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

They told us what the demos were but it didn't seem that they told us what the operating system was. (Did I miss it?)

We know that Linux runs on Cell but does Windows? Not just CE. Full blown Vista.

TFA made a remark about pigs parallel parking. Seems appropriate.

Re:Does it run Windows

[Ron_Fitzgerald]

During the motion sensor demo with the Transformers movie it was Vista.

Re:Does it run Windows

[lexarius]

Cell is a PPC chip and Windows hasn't run on PPC in a while. But this laptop gets around that by using the Cell as a coprocessor. The main processor is an Intel-type.

Re:Does it run Windows

[Sketch]

The Xbox360 runs a version of Windows. The Xbox360 is PPC-based. Therefore, Windows runs on PPC. Maybe not a standard desktop version you could buy, but Microsoft could probably be persuaded to give a test version to a major vendor if they thought it would be a worthwhile project.

Re:Does it run Windows

[lexarius]

Sure, and you can probably still find disks for Windows NT 3.51 for PPC, but the guy wanted to know if they had full-on Windows Vista running on Cell.

Synergistic processing elements?

[Anonymous Coward]

Synergistic processing elements are all well and good, but will they allow me to leverage my paradigm to strategically impact my bottom line to produce a win-win? This is important, I need feedback!

Great Demo...

[Anonymous Coward]

...too bad it only recognizes faces. Would be great for my pr0n collection.

Re:Great Demo...

[risk one]

So you're saying you can recognize pornstars by their genitals, but not by their faces? Truly, you are the master of pron-sadness.

nice advertising pitch

[__aaqvdr516]

underling: Our hardware sales are falling, people are starting to realize they don't need to upgrade! Toshiba CEO: I've got it, put in one of those Cell processor thingies. Get me Sony on the phone now! Sony: Hello? Oh yes we've got a giant bin in the back with all of the cell processors that didn't make the grade for our PS3. Oh you'd like to buy some? Excellent! Actually if you'd like we could pull some of the better ones out of the PS3's sitting on the shelves, they're not being used anyways. No? Damn.... Toshiba CEO: We have them now....

Re:nice advertising pitch

[BUL2294]

Toshiba CEO: I've got it, put in one of those Cell processor thingies. Get me Sony on the phone now! Sony: Hello? Oh yes we've got a giant bin in the back with all of the cell processors that didn't make the grade for our PS3. Oh you'd like to buy some? Excellent!

Talk about ironic! Toshiba uses Sony techonology to improve on a laptop. Hmmmm, HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray anyone???

Re:nice advertising pitch

[DrXym]

Toshiba make the cell processors for Sony. They probably do test the processors to see which have 7 or 8 working SPUs and send them off to Sony. The rest could be used for other tasks that require a general purpose chip with DSP-like functionality but require less SPUs.

BTW it's the ultimate irony that Toshiba make the processor for the machine that was / is killing HD DVD. But I expect the Japanese electronics industry is full of incestuous, contradictory partnerships like this.

Re:nice advertising pitch

[gEvil (beta)]

Talk about ironic! Toshiba uses Sony techonology to improve on a laptop.

It's not "Sony" technology. Sony, Toshiba, and IBM joined together several years ago to co-develop the Cell processor. Also, if I'm not mistaken, Toshiba is handling the manufacturing of a good number of the chips.

Re:nice advertising pitch

[antek9]

It's not incestuous at all, it's called a win/win situation. Although everyone (except IBM) also keeps losing a little bit at the same time. BTW, the summary is incorrect in that it completely forgets about/ignores the Cell chip also powering IBM's Blade servers. Not a small factor if you want to determine the chip's relative failure or success.

Re:nice advertising pitch

[Wdomburg]

Actually Sony sold all their fabs to Toshiba back in October. They've retained a minority capital stake, but are no longer involved in operation. It's not just the Cell either; they're handling production of the RSX and some of the parts for the PS2 line as well.

my two cents...

[apodyopsis]

I imagine Linux will be using it more effectively until MS see sales leverage in it.

24 hours on a normal PC, 3 hours on a CELL? those stats kind of say it all

finally some hardware that might make 3rd generation 3D desktops a reality

should really, really appeal to the gaming market

but what about the power consumption? the PS3 is quite greedy and there is a standard CPU as well. is this going to impact it?

that is one serious number cruncher in a laptop, almost certainly good for simulations like CFD work

I'll still holding out for my multi CELL, cluster desktop super computer for CFD work and personal rendering farm.

last, I want one!

Re:my two cents...

[malevolentjelly]

As someone who has once been a member of a PS3 game development team, I can tell you that any benefit to gamers would have to be hardcoded into either the system or directX- if this usage of the cell isn't widespread, you won't see much for it. I doubt there are enough cpu-mages in the open source world to integrate it seamlessly into a linux desktop environment, either. Supporting it would be too hard for non-hardware savvy devs.

Reminds us of ATARI Falcon, NeXTstations

[Saffaya]

Those had a 56001 DSP along their motorola main CPU for extra mathematical oomph, and impressive realtime visual or sound effects.
If this Cell inclusion could become a trend, it could lead to a lot of interesting applications.
(especially from the free software world, demo-scene, etc ...)

Re:Reminds us of ATARI Falcon, NeXTstations

[clickclickdrone]

Damn, beat me to it. I had exactly the same thought re the Falcon. Nice for audio processing if nothing else :-)

Re:Reminds us of ATARI Falcon, NeXTstations

[Saffaya]

HeHe .. First Post on the ATARI Falcon ^^ !
Even though I took the time to check the exact DSP model on wikipedia for the NeXTstation, and confirm that the AMIGA 1200 didn't have any.

Too bad I was too poor to afford a Falcon 030 at the time.
I was drooling over my friend's, and marveling at the applications available thanks to the DSP.
Can you say Apex Media ?
Even the guys using SGI wanted that program. First time I was seeing image morphing done on home computers.

Re:Reminds us of ATARI Falcon, NeXTstations

[Nimey]

And the Mac Quadra AV series, with that 66 MHz DSP from TI.

Re:Reminds us of ATARI Falcon, NeXTstations

[Anonymous Coward]

But there, of course, your problem was getting the data across the comparatively-glacial bus.

Is it really worth it with only 4 SPUs? Call us when it's 16.

Re:Reminds us of ATARI Falcon, NeXTstations

[Alsee]

If this Cell inclusion could become a trend, it could lead to a lot of interesting applications.

Yeah. Interesting applications indeed.

"Cell Broadband Engine Support for Privacy Security and Digital Rights Management"

Note that that is an official IBM published technical paper on the Cell and that that is IBM's own title.

And even with that link, someone ALWAYS manages to come along and call it a tinfoil hat fantasia when I state that the Cell CPU has explicitly designed with DRM support in the hardware. Every cell chip has one or more DRM enforcement crypto keys locked in the chip. I would gladly go into technical detail on this DRM system (I am a bit of an expert on the TPM technical specs), but apparently the only way to OBTAIN the full details on the cell system is by first signing a legal Non Disclosure contract before they'll let you see the full specs. That is the reason I had to say "one or more DRM enforcement crypto keys locked in the chip", the publicly available technical papers do explicitly state there is such a key locked in the ship and give some of the info on how it is used, but many important details are lacking. The Cell hardware is explicitly designed for some sort of Trusted Computing architecture, but too many details are missing to state exactly how the Cell system parallels or differs from the Trusted Computing Group's from of Trusted Computing.

P.S.
If anyone is aware of any available good detailed technical specifications on the Cell "security" hardware design, I would much appreciate any links you can offer to such a specification. I've seen this and other similar information, but I'm looking for something more technical and more resembling this TPM specification.

P.P.S.
If anyone has detailed knowledge on this design, please write something up on it in Cell_microprocessor. I raised this issue MORE THAN A YEAR AGO on the talk page, with the usual replies about "fantasia" and how hardware designed for DRM enforcement "is not Digital Rights Management, per se" and that "Using the term, DRM, would probably be unnecessarily inflammatory" (that last one is particularly amusing considering that it was IBM itself is the one being "unnecessarily inflammatory" in describing it's own product!).
I haven't actually written anything into the Wikipedia article on the Cell yet because I still only have a half-assed technical understanding on the design, and maybe I'm too much of a perfectionist but I don't want write something wildly vague and I don't want to write something that may be explicitly or implicitly inaccurate on the technical design and capabilities of the system.

-

Re:I for one......

[Anonymous Coward]

unoriginal - loser

Security systems galore!

[RingDev]

So it can take low res video, convert it to high res video, do facial recognition, and organize those recognized faces for easy playback... the potential for it's use in security and espionage systems is huge!

It is both exciting, and slightly scary.

-Rick

think of the possibilities

[philmack]

I'm totally going to buy one of these just to sort my porn collection

Re:Not a good name

[somersault]

Son.. I didn't understand a word you just said. Spurs are what cowboys use. Suns are big things in the sky that appear to move very slowly. Crazy Americans.

IBm still having problems with yields?

[Raleel]

So, I had read that the PS3 was really great for IBM because they are easier to make, having less SPE's. you could essentially use the ones that missed quality specs by 1 SPE and put it into a PS3 just fine. Now we've got this one with 4 SPEs, which is half of what goes into a full Cell.

Not that I'm saying that this is bad (indeed, less waste I suppose, and probably a better profit margin for them), but it does seem like it's indicating that IBM is still having yield problems with the Cell. Feel free to show me how I'm wrong, I'm not trying to be snarky or negative about it

Re:IBm still having problems with yields?

[tppublic]

but it does seem like it's indicating that IBM is still having yield problems with the Cell

1) Something tells me it's far more likely that Toshiba is trying to find something to do with their extra parts. They manufacture it, too, since Sony sold them the fab. IBM is not a sole-source supplier for Sony.

2) Some yield loss, especially with a chip the size of Cell, is expected. No chip will ever yield 100% (it's not worth the engineering effort to get there). So to presume that the sale of a product like this indicates "problems" is a false assumption. Since it's statistically likely that the failures occur in an SPE (due to their size) and it seems like Cell has the ability to individually control which SPEs are active, this makes great sense, as an incremental sale of a product that would otherwise not be sold.

Re:IBm still having problems with yields?

[SQL Error]

Considering that it's a different chip, and manufactured by Toshiba, I'd guess that IBM's yields don't have much to do with it.

Re:IBm still having problems with yields?

[SQL Error]

Aha. Press release with details of the SpursEngine chip here.

Re:IBm still having problems with yields?

[blitzkrieg3]

Good point. Maybe we should tag this !cell.

Re:IBm still having problems with yields?

[raftpeople]

In addition, the Cell roadmap discussed some time ago showed a mini-cell (4SPU, low power) as one of the original targets.

I can see this either getting killed by or

[AndGodSed]

killing DRM.

From TFA:

Toshiba had four demos running, the first of which transformed standard-definition video into 1080p. This takes any grubby-looking 640x480-pixel video -- of the sort you might record with a mobile phone or digital camera -- applies some hardcore image processing, and spits it out a few hours later as full 1080p. The effect was extremely impressive, and proves that you can, to some extent, polish a turd.

I wonder how current DRM strategy would cope with this feature. By downgrading your upgraded video, disabling the Cell processor or switching the screen off?

Or would this make life for DRM so difficult that it is eventually abandoned?

Re:I can see this either getting killed by or

[Firethorn]

upscaled images would still be inferior to images from the original source at that scale.

One of my personal irks is the unlimited image enhancement many CSI type shows engage in. You can only upscale so much. Though the killer was the one movie that got details by rotating the viewpoint by 90 degrees.

NBA

[tepples]

Son.. I didn't understand a word you just said. I understand that most people who live outside North America don't follow U.S. professional basketball as closely as U.S. residents do, so I'll help you out: Phoenix Suns and San Antonio Spurs are clubs in the National Basketball Association (NBA).

Re:NBA

[somersault]

Ooh I got a Phoenix Suns basketball about a decade ago - I liked the colour scheme, hehe :D I was thinking they were American 'Football' teams..

M$ should be happy . . .

[thesuperbigfrog]

Finally there's a laptop that can give you the Windows Vista Aero experience as Microsoft intended!

Re:M$ should be happy . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

AHAHAHAHAHA! "M$"!!! Pure comedy genius right there, folks! Wow! You're fresh AND witty!

Re:M$ should be happy . . .

[felipekk]

Here, this chair might help you release all that "energy"...

Whoa

[Moraelin]

Whoa, you mean it could be used to find the facials in security camera feeds too? Hmm, damn, do you think it's too late to change career track to the guy watching those feeds?

Re:Not a good name

[TheJerg]

They're also basketball teams... if you're into that sort of thing.

Quadra 660AV/840AV

[SuperBanana]

Those had a 56001 DSP along their motorola main CPU for extra mathematical oomph, and impressive realtime visual or sound effects.

The Quadra 660AV and 840AV had an AT&T DSP in it that handled all of the sound and video functions. It could also do voice recognition of any menu item, button, or a universal command set within a decent amount of time. It also had a telephone interface box which let it mimic a fax machine or data modem (and I say mimic, because it was horribly unreliable at the latter; fax transmissions were short enough that your chances were better), or behave as an answering machine.

There was also exactly ONE application that I remember for the DSP aside from what Apple used the DSP for: one could use the DSP to do fractals in a fraction of the time the 68040 processor could, though the DSP ran at about twice the clock speed (25mhz vs. 55mhz I believe.) In short: utterly useless, and it was discontinued after a year or two. It did have a clever feature or two, one of which was that it could load the ROM (for those of you who don't remember, all the system toolbox commands were in ROM, not on-disk) into RAM, which would suck several precious MB- but would dramatically and noticeably speed up the system. The functionality came via a third-party hack.

The best "feature", however, was its crashes. Given this was an old System-7/8/9 machine and 68040 based, it suffered from the usual stability problems, only multiplied by about ten-fold because of all the shit that was needed to handle the funky DSP graphics/sound/etc. The best part: the main CPU and the DSP would get out of sync during these crashes, and would feed garbage to each other. Kind of like catting /dev/random to the input of a 10-foot-tall milling machine, you have no idea what you're going to get, but it'll be impressive to watch.

Ask any 660AV/840AV owner. It was kind of like watching a dozen first-grader buggy logo scripts running, accompanied by the sound of a dozen Amigas crashing into a dozen Commodores whilest each was running a 'tracker' playing a corrupted MOD file, with pushy solos by a bored 6 year old Recorder player.

Re:Quadra 660AV/840AV

[raddan]

Wow. As a teenager, I drooled over those machines, and my all-consuming goal was to save enough paper route money to buy one. I ended up opting for the much more affordable LCIII. I had had a taste of the 68040 at my father's work-- one of the programmers had a Quadra 950-- and I always wanted one. I ended up getting a Quadra 605 some time later on a trade-in deal that a local computer shop was doing, and that was a great machine, but I never forgot how badass those AV machines seemed. After your story, I guess I'm glad I didn't go that route. When I toured colleges my senior year in high school, I recall that one school (CMU or Colby, I can't remember) had piles of the AV machines and SGI machines, and I literally associated those machines in my mind with COMPUTER SCIENCE. I still do in some ways... computer hardware is so boring now!

Re:Quadra 660AV/840AV

[chasd]

There was also exactly ONE application that I remember for the DSP aside from what Apple used the DSP for: one could use the DSP to do fractals in a fraction of the time the 68040 processor could

The big use for the AV models was the Photoshop plug-in that allowed the DSP to do image effects ( and RGB => CMYK conversions ) faster than what the CPU would do. The AV series was the hot ticket in prepress for a while. There were third-party add-in NuBus boards that had multiple DSPs to speed up things even more. I believe the audio program Deck also had a version that would use the DSP.

The best "feature", however, was its crashes.

I didn't experience those crashes on our AV's. Now, if you used Internet Explorer during that time, Microsoft put a bunch of garbage in the System Folder that caused crashes, it could have been that instead of the DSP.

Re:Quadra 660AV/840AV

[bill_mcgonigle]

Ask any 660AV/840AV owner.

I used a 660AV for about a year at work and didn't have those problems. I was working Mac tech support at the time, so perhaps I was ahead of the curve.

Oh, and the 660AV could do speech recognition just as well as a brand-new dual-core MBP with Leopard! ;)

Re:Quadra 660AV/840AV

[macshome]

Yeah, I used a 660AV for years and years and never had a bit of trouble out of it. The GeoPort Telcom adaptor worked fine as a 14.4 modem too. Better in fact than the 1st gen PPC 601 hardware since it used the DSP to do the modulation and not a software modem.

Yes, but...

[athdemo]

Will it run Crysis--er, I mean, linux?

Toshiba and BS Bios

[sgt scrub]

Strange that they disable the VMX extensions in their laptops and refuse to allow the owners to re-enable it but then add more functionality to the machine. I'd be happy if they would just let me take advantage of what I thought I was buying. It would also be nice if they would fix the ACPI incompatibilities with nVidia graphics so I don't have to rewrite asm files to get the gpu cooling fan to work properly. I'd go into the whole list of things that helped me to decide to never buy anything with the Toshiba name on it but there isn't enough space or time. This link, however, says it all.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/phoenix-bios-only-works-with-vista.html

Redundant?

[Vegan Pagan]

This article focuses on the effect of Cell's SPEs (DSPs), but Cell also has a PowerPC CPU and a RAMBUS memory bus. So unless Toshiba's removed those parts from this version of Cell, this laptop, with its Intel CPU, has two complete, separate, incompatible CPUs, memory buses and memory banks. That'll make this laptop big, expensive, and power hungry.

Both Intel and AMD want to integrate more powerful DSPs onto the CPU in various ways, so unless Toshiba intends to eventually make an x86-compatible version of Cell, or make a PPC-based Cell laptop that doesn't run Windows, I'm afraid this thing's going to be a niche market.

Re:Redundant?

[644bd346996]

This article focuses on the effect of Cell's SPEs (DSPs), but Cell also has a PowerPC CPU and a RAMBUS memory bus. So unless Toshiba's removed those parts from this version of Cell, this laptop, with its Intel CPU, has two complete, separate, incompatible CPUs, memory buses and memory banks. How is this any different from the laptops with high-end graphics chips? Also, it is worth noting that this chip tops out at about 20W, so it probably uses much less power than the intel chip for things like video encoding and decoding.

Re:Redundant?

[Wdomburg]

Rather than speculating, you could read the press release. This isn't "The Cell"; it's the SpursEngine. Completely different design. Sits on a standard PCI-E bus. Draws 10-20W in prototype.

OS?

[Kludge]

What is the OS?

Re:OS?

[ChunderDownunder]

Judging by the demo, some version of Vista.

Nice math

[ubergeek65536]

It has four SPEs at 1.5GHz the PS3 has eight SPEs running at 3GHz, making it approximately 75 per cent quicker.

Re:Nice math

[spazdor]

You mean 400 percent?

Scans ALL my movie files?

[neo]

Um... could I skip a certain folder. I mean you're going to find faces, but I can't really say that the expressions are going to be good thumbnails. Um... let me just move those files somewhere on an external drive and disconnect it... just to be sure.

Voice Dictation

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know if anyone (IBM?) is working on voice recognition using a CellBE processor? This seems like an obvious and very parallelizable application, but I have not heard of it being done yet.

Maybe even release a simple port as a library set to developers.

Re:Voice Dictation

[LionMage]

It would be a pretty obvious application. I was working for IBM research as an intern, doing QA and beta testing on their Tangora engine for OS/2, called TangLite. The machines only had 486 processors, which weren't quite beefy enough to do the necessary calculations, so IBM fitted all the PS/2 machines with DSP microchannel cards to offload the computations. So IBM isn't averse to using this technique to boost performance, at least in-house.

Of course, when they released OS/2 with built-in speech recognition (code named Merlin, I believe), it was still essentially the TangLite engine, but running natively on the Pentium processor (which was beefy enough, barely).

Photos from CES

[barl0w2]

I took pics of a lot of cool stuff at CES here: http://flickr.com/photos/barl0w/ There are some pretty cool things there this year, but I think web-cam hand gesture recognition is overrated.

Great research!

[aliquis]

Yeah, everyone knows 8*3 is 75% more than 4*1.5, just because the later one is 25% as much doesn't make the former one 75% more, and will never do...

Also why would this be that expensive considering the PS3 got 4 times as much SPE power, the ppc core, good gfx chips, blu-ray and so on and still doesn't cost that much of a fortune compared to laptop prices?

Re:Great research!

[Wdomburg]

The article also seems to ignore that the SpursEngine includes decidated MPEG-2/4 decoding and encoding, which the PS3 lacks. I'm not sure but I think that could make a wee bit of difference for video stream processing. :)

Re:Great research!

[LionMage]

Yeah, everyone knows 8*3 is 75% more than 4*1.5, just because the later one is 25% as much doesn't make the former one 75% more, and will never do...

Also why would this be that expensive considering the PS3 got 4 times as much SPE power[...]

You're assuming that number of processing cores and clock speed are the only factors involved in the performance difference, and that performance scales linearly as the product of the two numbers. Neither assumption is correct. A dual-core Intel processor is not automatically twice as fast as a single-core Intel processor of the same technology generation and clock speed. Similarly, doubling the clock speed of a CPU doesn't make it twice as fast at performing real-world operations; ultimately, you're constrained by RAM speeds and latencies, so unless your entire working set fits in the cache of your processor, you won't see that kind of scaling.

Also, the article got one factoid wrong -- the Cell processor in the PS3 might be manufactured with 8 SPEs on the die, but one of those is disabled; so there are really only 7 SPEs on the PS3 that are available to do work, of which one is (I believe) dedicated to the OS. Initially, Sony and Toshiba were worried about Cell processor yields, so they are using both fully functional chips with one SPE disabled, and marginally functional chips where one SPE didn't pass tests (and therefore was disabled).

Re:Great research!

[kilgortrout]

I think you also have to factor in the fact that the PS3 is subsidized by future game sales, i.e. they can sell it cheap and make their profit on the games you subsequently will buy for the PS3.

Re:Great research!

[aliquis]

Yeah. I know that will be a factor, but considering the amount of games most people buy I doubt it's a huge amount, hopefully for Sony only 100 dollar or thereabout. Maybe more since sales are rather crappy.

Re:Great research!

[aliquis]

But now you're just beeing an ass and argue for the sake of arguing.

Performance DO scale linearly for a perfect application for the hardware in question. However neither of us, the article writers or even Toshiba probably know what instructions will be run and therefor we can assume that they are comparing raw performance values. Or will you really try to argue that they didn't just made a misstake there they thought the larger one of 1:4 was 75% more and not 4 times as much?

I know about the disabpled SPE and where thinking about typing about it, but I thought about 9 vs 8 then and not 8 vs 7 so I just typed 8 anyway. As I read it I think you can turn on the disabled SPE aswell, as in that it's a backup in case one of the others dies so the chip can switch over to the spare one, that part may be wrong thought since it sounds kind of weird, thought it's easy to open up additional pipelines on some graphics units so who knows. Also the OS is part of whatever software it runs anyway but still a valid point.

Anyway for the rest of your x core vs x/2 core and balanced system specs and so on I will just ignore it since it's as I said just arguing for the sake of arguing. I already know that stuff but it wasn't the point of my post.

Re:Great research!

[aliquis]

But I guess the [67]8xx-class or similair gpu of the ps3 can do the mpeg II part? Maybe. Much less likely H.264.

Re:This is cool, but DO NOTO BUY Toshiba Laptops!

[Bryansix]

Not quite true. I have a Toshiba that I disabled standby on when you close the lid. I've left this on under my desk for days. It gets hot but it still works fine. And this is a refurbished Toshiba Laptop.

Conflicting partnerships

[Per Abrahamsen]

BTW it's the ultimate irony that Toshiba make the processor for the machine that was / is killing HD DVD. But I expect the Japanese electronics industry is full of incestuous, contradictory partnerships like this. I suspect it is the norm everywhere that large companies are collaborating in some areas, while competing in others. Not something particular to Japan.

Re:Conflicting partnerships

[rbanffy]

"I suspect it is the norm everywhere that large companies are collaborating in some areas"

It's not even rare to see them cooperating in some areas while suing each other on other areas.

This is called business.

Oh I feel you.

[AndGodSed]

I always sit there and think "Who consulted on this movie?"

Then again there's my dad that takes hollywood spy drama as truth, and still argues with me that because it is in the movie, it must be possible.

NCIS is a bit better at this though - plus there is the ultimate geek dreamgirl Abby...

Perhaps it Can Sort Using The Dewey Decimal System

[bigtrike]

I wonder if it will be powerful enough to separate my religion porn from my technology porn and categorize appropriately

Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just one step towards making Cell an x86 extension. Pretty soon, you'll get one package -- multi-core x86_64 with your standard x87,MMX,SSE, etc. with the Cell ISA thrown into the mix. How bout a GPU for shits n giggles while we're at it... all tied to the same fat cache and memory. I mean, Intel did 80 cores in the lab. I don't think its unreasonable to assume that at least 4 of those cores could be Cell SPEs and a couple more could be GPUs. Tell me that wouldn't be bad ass. That fucker would have to have about a million pins on it.

Re:Nice

[DrXym]

The Cell is a PowerPC architecture chip. I'm sure in principle the same idea could be implemented with an x86 acting as the ringmaster (so to speak) for the SPUs, but IBM might have an issue with that.

Re:Nice

[Wdomburg]

The Cell is a PPC chip. The SpursEngine is not.

(BTW, Toshiba co-developed it and owns the majority of the fab capacity for it.)

Re:Nice

[DrXym]

Just had a look at some slides on SpursEngine. Sounds like a fairly sound idea, although persuading companies to include the chip will be the sticking point. I could see it sitting alongside IGP chips, providing functionality that is expensive to do on the CPU.

Re:Nice

[Wdomburg]

They've always got the option of shipping it in their own notebooks, of course. :) If consumers start buying them selling the tech to third parties becomes a lot easier.

The embedded sector may be a more fertile market than general purpose computers though. Designing a set top box, video recorder or HD media player? Use a low cost, low power system on a chip for basic functionality and offload all the video processing onto this bugger.

And of course Toshiba is already talking about putting a Cell into HDTVs for high quality upscaling and picture-in-picture.

Terrible News Story of an Interesting PC

[Doc Ruby]

That news coverage was idiotic, full of wrong facts, and not worth watching for the commentary. SD TV is not VGA (at least 800x600 is required), the PS3 Cell has 7 working SPUs, not 8, and one more is dedicated to onchip management (unavailable).

The commenter didn't bother to ask how the 1080p simulation compared to actual 1080p. Or anything else, like why a Cell is necessary for the gesture recognition. And their scepticism over a relatively inexpensive Cell laptop shows they're truly idiotic, because probably the favorite Cell feature (to its manufacturers, like Toshiba) is that its redundant SPUs mean higher yields despite defects, so each chip (even with fewer working SPUs) is still fast and much cheaper (since it can be sold, instead of throwing it away like its traditional architecture competitors). A 4-SPU Cell should be really cheap, when the 7-SPU Cell in the PS3 costs about $100.

But a Cell laptop looks very interesting (especially if its $1500). Too bad it drew that idiot to block the view of it.

Re:Terrible News Story of an Interesting PC

[imsabbel]

SD TV IS VGA

Reminder:
VGA 640x480
SVGA 800x600
XGA 1024x786

Re:Terrible News Story of an Interesting PC

[Doc Ruby]

640x480 != 800x600

Even though NTSC is 486 lines, even a close approximation is at least 720x480. Which requires at least 800x600, the next largest VGA-type resolution.

Re:Terrible News Story of an Interesting PC

[Blaskowicz]

Analog television standards actually don't have a horizontal resolution.

Re:Terrible News Story of an Interesting PC

[Doc Ruby]

Yes, which is why even 720 columns is an approximation. Usually it's 800x600x16bit, but that's just because that was the minimum acceptable simulation, rather than 8bit when 24bit was rare and expensive. But really it's 24bit for acceptable simulation of NTSC, on a CRT or high-end LCD (or plasma or DLP).

The point is that even at high color bit depth, any less than 720 columns doesn't look as good as the minimum NTSC quality. 720 is 12.5% larger than 640, so that's a substantial improvement over VGA. Perhaps more to the point, the aspect ratio of 720x480 is obviously closer to NTSC than is VGA.

Re:Terrible News Story of an Interesting PC

[majortom1981]

I thought the cell has 8. except that in the ps3 the 8th one is hidden because its sued by the ps3's OS.

Re:Terrible News Story of an Interesting PC

[Doc Ruby]

The Cell (CBE) chip starts with 8 SPUs. The ones that come out of manufacturing tested OK with 8 working go into expensive IBM workstations. The ones with 7 go into the cheaper PS3. The ones with fewer supposedly go into even cheaper things like HD TVs, disc players and the like.

On PS3, one of the 7 is used to manage the dataflow around the chip, servicing the other 6 SPUs, the PPU, RAM and other units connected to the EIB. I do believe that the internal 7th SPU is directed to do so by the Sony Hypervisor, but the OS (whether GameOS or OtherOS - say, Linux) doesn't get to see it at all. Only 6 SPUs are available to the OS proper, but that OS gets "magical" powers out of the Cell as the hidden SPU orchestrates the data and task flow without explicit direction.

Re:Not a good name

[Minwee]

But what are they if I'm not into that sort of thing? Shrimp forks?

IBM Cell-based Blade

[vtTom]

> So far the only uses for Cell chips have been research stuff and the PS3. Umm. Then what do you call this? http://www-03.ibm.com/technology/splash/qs20/ Unless that's "research".

ASL

[Orig1]

I liked the reading hand signs with the web cam. How about converting American sign language to text.

Much Better SpursEngine Info Here...

[Doc Ruby]

Even the Wikipedia SpursEngine article has much better info than that idiotic news coverage.

Most interesting is the claim that Linux drivers will be available for the SpursEngine. If the code that the Cell's SPUs run to process video is available, it could be ported to the PS3 Linux that has 7 (not 3-4) SPUs available, right onchip with a huge bus to the PPC CPU.

Recognize faces?

[camusflage]

scans all your movie files, recognizes faces, and creates thumbnails of those faces

And by faces, they mean boobies.

3 Little Words

[Jafar00]

I want one! :D

Re:Not a good name

[TheJerg]

Sex toys?

PS3 emulation?

[Anonymous Coward]

The most interesting use for this sucker is -in my mind at least- a semi-decent PS3 emulator.

Now...

[Strange Quark Star]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!

Re:This is cool, but DO NOTO BUY Toshiba Laptops!

[Bpa]

Well it's good to know someone has had better luck. Mine was a 5105 Satellite Limited edition. It had a Geforce 4 (mobile version) chip on it. That is what was overheating on mine. I got it in about 2002 Pentium 4 2GHz. It quit working for me in 2004; don't know how long you have had yours, but beware. I have asked other Toshiba owners, I have run into about this, and they seem to confirm it. There is a large MSN group called "Toshiba 5105 Display Problem" dealing with this issue that I have been a member of for about 2 years. The other day I went to radio with my friend who I recommend the Toshiba to to get a laptop cooling pad. I asked the Radioshack employee if they sold a lot of those to Toshiba owners, and he said "That's funny that you ask that because I got my uncle a Toshiba recently and he has tried a number of things to keep his laptop from powering off when it gets too hot, and has had to send it back to the manufacturer several times." There is nothing I can really do about it, except try to let people know not to buy Toshiba laptops. I have heard good things about IBM thinkpads, and HP laptops. I like Dell, but have heard some stories of those overheating as well.

Re:This is cool, but DO NOTO BUY Toshiba Laptops!

[Bpa]

Well it's good to know someone has had better luck. Mine was a 5105 Satellite Limited edition. It had a Geforce 4 (mobile version) chip on it. That is what was overheating on mine. I got it in about 2002 Pentium 4 2GHz. It quit working for me in 2004; don't know how long you have had yours, but beware. I have asked other Toshiba owners, I have run into about this, and they seem to confirm it. There is a large MSN group called "Toshiba 5105 Display Problem" dealing with this issue that I have been a member of for about 2 years. The other day I went to radioshack with my friend who I recommend the Toshiba to to get a laptop cooling pad. I asked the Radioshack employee if they sold a lot of those to Toshiba owners, and he said "That's funny that you ask that because I got my uncle a Toshiba recently and he has tried a number of things to keep his laptop from powering off when it gets too hot, and has had to send it back to the manufacturer several times." There is nothing I can really do about it, except try to let people know not to buy Toshiba laptops. I have heard good things about IBM thinkpads, and HP laptops. I like Dell, but have heard some stories of those overheating as well.

Jackpot!

[neomunk]

I think you just gave me a chubber! :-D

Seriously though, what you describe is EXACTLY what I've been hoping to see happen since I first heard about the Cell. I'm especially excited about the multi-Cell features (which you correctly point out as being a major focus of the architectural design) now that our more general multi-core architectures have advanced enough to let the combination of Cell/x86 really shine. Now all we need to do is get a GPU/physics-in-hardware combination (possibly Cell powered itself) involved to start modeling everything to our hearts content. All in a home desktop.

Basically, I don't have mod points today, so you're getting a more detailed (but less karmatic(?))version of +1 Insightful.

Re:Jackpot!

[Doc Ruby]

Another big benefit to this Toshiba laptop would be mass-market chipset support for anything with a Cell in it. The PS3 is not only hobbled by RAM and Hypervisor, it's also a niche platform. As is the Cell blade platform that IBM and others (though they seem to have disappeared) have announced. Just seeing a "regular PC" with a programmable Cell (or even just a bank of programmable SPUs like the SpurEngine) would push us over the threshold towards a larger general community of Cell/SPU programmers, and an increasing library of critical code ported. I think the SpurEngine is the boundary case, and if it's not vaporware (and even if it is, it's still getting close), then the new landscape lies just ahead.

mmmm porn

[IronMagnus]

"Toshiba had four demos running... Demo 3... scans all your movie files, recognizes faces, and creates thumbnails of those faces. You can then click the thumbnails to watch scenes with those faces in, or compile them in a separate playlist."" ...my oh my, this will make those hundreds of gigs of porn so much easier to watch.

Toshiba, Sony, HDDVD and Cell?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm consfused... In the HD war, it's Toshiba VS Sony, yet with the Cell, Toshiba and Sony are together?

Parent NOT informative

[imsabbel]

Sorry, but maybe you should come into this century. Your nice old f*I^2 is not true at all anymore. ESPECIALLY for laptop chips.
And hasnt been since we reached 90nm.

Check out Wikipedia and read up on leakage currents and the way to deal with them (and realize that your hypothetical laptop cell would use those 15W for leakage alone... tons of ugly logic transitors and little cache that can be efficiently power-managed)

Re:Parent NOT informative

[default luser]

I am in this century. I guess I need to fully explain everything, or somehow I have zero credibility.

Leakage power is directly proportional to VSB (the voltage applied between the source and drain of the MOSFET), which decreases when you reduce the applied voltage VDD. And, contrary to popular belief, the leakage power has been constrained successfully, thanks to improvements like strained silicon.

As you can imagine, low-voltage operation (like, say, Cell at approximately 1.1v) means very low leakage. When we reduce the operating voltage to below 1.0v (see my post above), that low leakage practically disappears.

Define "Research Stuff"

[CyberLife]

I'm wondering about the statement:

So far the only uses for Cell chips have been research stuff and the PS3.

May one suppose by "research stuff" they are referring to the end-uses of the chip? One could interpret the statement as meaning the chip itself has only (outside of the PS3) been used as the subject of research. That would seem to contradict the server offerings from Mercury Systems.

Losing?

[reiisi]

Losing MSWindows compatibility could be seen as a win by some, ...