14 DAY TRIAL // Sometimes developing a new piece of technology in the computer hardware industry takes more resources that are available to a single company and then alliances and partnerships are formed, just like it was the case with the Cell processing units which were developed through a joint effort by IBM, Sony and Toshiba. This processor find itself a use almost immediately in the hugely popular PlayStation 3 game console and while it looks that Sony is happy with the current state of affairs, Toshiba is pushing things a little bit further as the company just announced the launch of a derivative product.
Named the SpursEngine, this new chips can be considered a lower cost variant of the original Cell processing unit and it keeps the most important features of the project, like the synergistic processing elements (SPEs) and video encoding/decoding units.
This new Toshiba made chip is not designed to work as a stand-alone unit, but rather to act as a co-processor that includes four Cell-like high performance RISC based processing cores and hardware components dedicated to encoding and decoding video streams, as well as XDR memory support and native support of the PCI Express system interface. As most of the processing power consuming operations like the video encoding and decoding are done at a low hardware level, the SpursEngine chips are able to reach a high standard of performance while keeping its energy footprint low. According to the news site xbitlabs, this Toshiba prototype is operating at a clock frequency of 1.5GHz, while consuming in full load conditions only between 10 and 20 watts.
Thanks to its hardware make up this product may find a number of uses in general consumer electronics where the video encoding and decoding capabilities are paired with the general computation features offered by a traditional central processing unit, while in x86 based computer systems, the SpursEngine chip may be well suited for transformations, physics and other computing.
This SpursEngine chip prototype will be first publicly presented in October at the CEATEC JAPAN 2007 show and a number of portable computer systems that are integrating it will use its capabilities in order to increase the performance when it comes to 3D image processing and manipulation. After this technological show, Toshiba plans to integrate the SpursEngine chip in a number of digital consumer products.