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

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?

[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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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

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)