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Toshiba Uses Cell Chip In Consumer Laptop

Posted by kdawson on from the thinking-outside-the-cell dept.

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."

12 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop? by TeknoHog · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    --
    Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  2. Re:Does it run Windows by Ron_Fitzgerald · · Score: 2, Informative

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

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    ~ Ron Fitzgerald
  3. Re:nice advertising pitch by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    This guy's the limit!
  4. NBA by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).
  5. Re:nice advertising pitch by antek9 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    --
    A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
    Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
  6. Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop? by LWATCDR · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  7. Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop? by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 2, Informative
    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.

  8. Re:Does it run Windows by Sketch · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

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    -- OpenVerse Visual Chat: http://openverse.com
  9. Photos from CES by barl0w2 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  10. Great research! by aliquis · · Score: 2, Informative

    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?

  11. Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop? by Bri3D · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  12. Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop? by Wdomburg · · Score: 2, Informative

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

    Not true