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

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: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?

[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.