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

Not cell-based, cell-assisted

[ALecs]

According to the article (and hinted by the summary), the thing has an ordinary Intel Core2Duo CPU. I'm assuming the cell is the "Toshiba quad code HD Processor" mentioned in the article. So it's a co-processor, then. My best guess it it's a 4-SPU cell processor without the PowerPC core. Weird...

Re:Not cell-based, cell-assisted

[crabbz]

Yes, it isn't a Cell, it is Toshiba's Spurs Engine with 4 SPEs and no PPE.

Re:Not cell-based, cell-assisted

[Sockatume]

So combined with the comment above that Ben Heck already did a PS3-based laptop, we find that the only accurate words in the headline are "toshiba", "launches", and "laptop".

Re:Not cell-based, cell-assisted

[AeroIllini]

Oh man I hope the combination of those three words involves a trebuchet.

Re:Where are the apps coming from?

[negRo_slim]

When is the last time a company come along with a proprietary technology like this and received market acceptance? I seem to recall companies like Aegia and Rambus... Hell RDRAM didn't even require any change to software and provided higher performance, but it was one company and of course the price remained high.... Nah I don't expect to see this go much further than it already has, a few people will buy it and it will ship with some in house programs on it and just like every other system from a major manufacturer support and software will slowly fade into obscurity. Sure a few websites will be started in dedication of this thing and they will light up their message boards with how superior and awesome it was/is/could of been...

Re:PAE mode?

[Anders]

Modern hardware except one particular Pentium M stepping (which was popular for a while) handles PAE. 64G RAM on 32-bit

But Windows does not.

Re:Where are the apps coming from?

[negRo_slim]

I don't think that will be too much of an issue. My guess it will be used as a device like a GPU or DSP on a sound card.

And we all know how easy it is to add hardware acceleration for products from major vendors like Creative, Nvidia, AMD... The architectures these companies have produced have far greater market penetration then Toshiba could dream to see and yet there isn't across the board support for such common devices. Not many are going to be coding for a piece of hardware only one manufacture is producing. Unless this thing is seen in rigs across the board and/or it demonstrates a highly tangible benefit it simply won't be supported by the fast majority of software.

The cell was NOT developed for the PS3

[WilliamBaughman]

Yes, think PS3 technology, developed jointly by Toshiba, Sony, and IBM.

Saying that the Cell BEA was developed for the PlayStation 3 is like saying the wheel was developed for razor scooters. The PlayStation 3 uses the Cell, but the Cell was not made solely for the PlayStation. The Cell was developed to be a floating point and vector arithmetic monster that would be at home in a supercomputer, which it is.

I have nothing against the PlayStation 3, but I get upset when a myth like this is perpetuated. Saying that one of the most powerful processors available today was 'made to play video games' detracts from it and gives readers an incorrect impression (in my humble opinion).

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.