Toshiba’s approach to Cell differs from that of development partners Sony and IBM in that it sees the multiprocessor architecture as co-processor technology which sits alongside the host CPU, not replacing it.
“We do not want to get in to a battle creating the next host processor architecture,” Emily Shirley, head of product marketing at Toshiba Europe, told EW.
Toshiba's first Cell chip is the SpursEngine, which is essentially a co-processor made up of four of Cell cores with hardware for decoding and encoding MPEG-2 and H.264 video.
One application is for HDTV up-scaling and the chip will upscale three hours of video content in an hour, this compares with over a day using a dual core processor, said Shirley.
The first chips, due next year, will run at a clock frequency of 1.5GHz and consume 10 to 20W.
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