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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."
this + mythtv = interesting possibilities
This spurs engine sounds just like an extra GPU...
Why not just go with CUDA or some other GP-GPU platform and avoid the hassle?
I know nVidia and AMD/ATI are doing H.264 decoding in hardware using their GPUs... I'm sure you can get software for encoders too.
Sigs are for the weak.
The mandatory "does it run Linux ?" boils down to "do they provide enough documentation to write drivers for it ?".
I RTFA, but I didn't find an answer in it.
Most feature hardware DEcoding (such as those you linked to). Few feature hardware ENcoding, as TFA does.
-in linux, no. only mpeg2 decoding
-in any OS, not really. There is a brand new ENCODER for h.264, but reviews show it to be crap and limited
Windows does have full GPU decoding of h.264 with modern nvidia (not sure about ATI, but it is likely), but that's it.
Decoding .264 isn't really such a big deal. The ability to do low-cost multi-pass 1080 h.264 encoding at greater than real-time is something that would be EXTREMELY welcome for my company. We're a video post production house and we burn *LOTS* of CPU cycles encoding video for delivery to clients. A sub $500 card that greatly streamlined that process would be VERY welcome. Especially if it's something you could do as a background process that effectively didn't interfere with the operation of the edit suite.
-Steve http://www.stevennicholson.com
The fate of this device hinges pretty much exclusively on the quality of its software and documentation. If all you get is some gaudy half-broken-and-all-ugly fixed purpose video encode decode app(in the fine tradition of graphics card shovelware, remember the bad old days when the card vendor was responsible for the driver?) then this thing is dead in the water. A few will sell to Netflix pirates looking to rip and encode 3 times as much video as they could ever watch, instead of just twice as much; but that'll be about it.
If it has good general purpose support(I'd really prefer that this mean "good documentation" and properlinux support; but I suspect a proprietary sdk would do alright as well) then it could be a killer in certain lower end computing scenarios. Since the cell is produced in nontrivial bulk, and this thing is only about 1/2 the complexity of a full cell(does that mean that this card is "spursengine on the half-cell?) it should be cheap, cheap, cheap compared to FPGA boards or custom ASICs for such purposes as the cell architecture is useful.
I hope the do the right thing, and get rewarded(and I hope so, surely somebody looking to sell computational hardware would see the virtues of making it as useful as possible for as many customers as possible?); but if they don't, I suspect that they'd be lucky to do as well as physX, and will probably do worse.
I want to be a synergistic procesing element!
Doesnt everyone?
NO SIG
meep meep?
Probably. We already have enough information about the CELL processor on its own to make use of it under Linux; this card is just taking a cut-down CELL and tacking a PCIe bus on it.
Unless they purposefully fucked the register table to prevent it, it's probably just a matter of finding the correct PCIe offsets to access known registers/segments on the CELL. While it's possible they could "sabotage" it to prevent the first-day-out-of-the-box Linux driver, chips modified this way usually have to go under more steps of formal validation again (beyond that of just throwing a PCIe controller on, and sheering a few SPUs off), so most companies won't do it.
Before we get too confident, though, there is a history of this kind of intentional fucking. Conexant acquired some video IP from a defunct company Brooktree, the BT8x8 model, which worked fabulously under Linux, which they re-released with virtually unchanged functionality, but with a completely revamped address table. Brooktree was more friendly and released the specs for its chips to the public, so the Linux driver was fantastic. Since Conexant would not release the new specs without an NDA (and is generally is Linux's bane when it comes to hardware), it took months to get the new driver back to the shape that the old one was in (and IIRC, it was only after someone stepped forward and went under the NDA to do so).
sweet, i can finally have my PVR record programs before they actually air!
but seriously though, how much is this card going to cost? is it just for professional video processing or will there be other uses for it as well? i wouldn't mind having one of these things for a PVR/media center, except for the fact that it needs a one-slot cooler, meaning it probably runs hot and noisy.
Lets say the PS3 retails for £300 (it's less than this, but what the hell, this is slashdot, we don't need to be accurate. Or impartial for that matter...let me start again) Lets say the shitty PS3 costs £300, which is far too bloody much, but once you take away the shitty Blu-Ray drive, the shitty Hard drive, shitty controller, shitty case, etc. the price for the shitty fully-fledged CELLs (7 of them, remember) can't be more than £100 and that's a safe overestimation, with added money for the Lube Sony will use to anally violate you with their shitty cocks. This chip has only 4 shitty cores of the shitty CELL and it's not even the full CELL, it's a shitter version of it so I'd say it's a safe bet that it SHOULD cost no more than £50-70, but since the company that makes it is so shitty, they'll probably triple that price. Cunts.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Mercury had a PCI-e cell expansion card for over a year now.
Unlike the leadtek one, the mercury version has the full version of the cell processor, with 8SPEs. Dont think it comes with any prebuilt codecs though.