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Cell Chip Coming To the PC Via a PCI Express Card
arcticstoat writes with an excerpt from Custom PC: "After developing a brand new CPU architecture from the ground-up, you'd expect that Toshiba, Sony and IBM would have more uses for the Cell architecture than the PlayStation 3, and Toshiba has been quick to make use of the architecture's HD video transcoding abilities in its new Qosimo laptops. However, Leadtek is now taking Toshiba's efforts a step further by putting the chip onto a PCI-E card for desktop PCs. The WinFast PxVC1100 is based on Toshiba's SpursEngine SE1000 processor, which is a cut-down version of the Cell chip. The SpursEngine chip features four SPEs (synergistic processing elements) based on 128-bit RISC cores, along with H.264 and MPEG-2 codecs, but it doesn't contain its own CPU as the chip in the PS3 does. The chip is capable of encoding and decoding H.264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video streams in hardware."
No it wont... because I'll bet you $1000 they will NOT create linux drivers or open up all the specs so that a linux driver could be written.
so we will get that card working in about 5 years after it's pretty much abandonded and someone reverse engineered it. Like the Hollywood+ cards back in the late 90's.
This card would make media center pc's and Linux XBMC awesome as well as letting myth play back HD recording nicely without having to throw insane amounts of processor at the job like you have to currently.
How about everyone contact leadtech and demand they open all the specs without a stupid NDA asap so that a linux driver can be made.
Nahh, that will never happen. The guys at leadtech are asshats.