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

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: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.