Toshiba Launches First Cell-based Laptop

MojoKid writes "On Tuesday, Toshiba launched the Qosmio G55-802, the first laptop available with the Cell CPU. Yes, think PS3 technology, developed jointly by Toshiba, Sony, and IBM. However, in particular, the Cell CPU is not about gaming, but about the multimedia experience. Taking the load away from the Intel CPU, the Cell processor performs gesture control, face navigation, transcoding and upscaling to HD. Interestingly (and necessary, with 4 GB of RAM), the system comes with 64-bit Vista installed by default, but 32-bit Vista ships as an option as well." However, semi-relatedly, if you'd prefer your Cells run open-source code, 1i1' blu3 writes "IBM's put up an open source project downloads page for the Cell processor — APIs, toolkits, IDEs, libraries, algorithms, etc. Most of the stuff on it right now is from SourceForge, but they are asking for user contributions to add to it." (Terra Soft's also been providing a Cell-compatible Linux distro for a while now, and according to Wikipedia the kernel's supported it since version 2.6.16.)

Comments

Availability

[DrYak]

I seem to recall companies like Aegia

The big difference is the availability.
Although both the Cell and the PhysX share some architecture design, it's about the only thing they have in common.

PhysX was only available on 1 single type of board. No tools available at all to develop code for the chip, only a physics library which only provided 1 single API.
The only thing you could do as a user is buy it, stick it into the computer and hope that game developper will release patches supporting it.
The only thing you could do as a developer is write some physics simulation into the game you're developing.

Cell has lot of tools to develop code to run of it. Including open source compilers (gcc for example), and including frameworks dedicated at doing stream computing (RapidMind can produce SPE code). Thanks to the fact that its main CPU part is a plain simple PowerPC, there is even a lot of prior knowledge that can be recycled.

And the Cell is available on lots of devide ranging on small device on which the would-be developer can test some code like PS3 (compatible with Linux out-of-the-box) and this laptop (x86-based with Vista, but offers a cell as a coprocessor) all the way up to big servers with several cell boardlet inside, ready to do some crazy super computing for scientist.

Anyone can develop for Cell and run pretty much everything they want on it, and even have access to a significative range of platform to test the code.

The cell is much more likely to experience some success that the PhysX did.