Toshiba has announced that it will release a laptop with a variant of cell processor jointly developed by and alliance of Sony, Toshiba and IBM known as STI. No firm date of laptop launch has been given but it is expected to be released this year.
Sony’s PlayStation also uses cell processor.
Cell is a microprocessor architecture and shorthand for Cell Broadband Engine Architecture. It includes a novel memory coherence architecture for which IBM received many patents. The architecture emphasizes efficiency/watt, prioritizes bandwidth over latency, and favors peak computational throughput over simplicity of program code. IBM also uses these Cell processors in a line of blade servers.
The Toshiba Qosmio G40 laptop will have a SpursEngine SE1000 chip, a Cell stream processor also used in the Sony PlayStation 3. Samples of the SE1000 chip began shipping from Toshiba on April 8. Toshiba has said it expects sales of 6 million units within the first three years.
The SpursEngine can do high-definition video encoding and decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 streams, among other capabilities. The four processing elements inside the chip have a clock frequency of 1.5GHz, while boasting a relatively low power envelope of 10 to 20 watts.
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