Toshiba laptop released containing Sony Cell CPU
Thrax
🐌Austin, TX Icrontian
<p>In a very bizarre twist of fate, the new Qosmio G55 laptop <a href="http://gizmodo.com/5025238/toshiba-qosmio-g55-is-first-laptop-with-cell-processor-aboard">harnesses the power</a> of Sony's lauded Cell CPU to handle multimedia tasks. Such tasks include signal upconversion (primarily 1080i upscaling), multimedia transcoding and gestural control.</p>
<p>Toshiba is billing the Cell chip has the "Quad Core HD" processor, which is a disarming marketing convention that conceals the irony of Toshiba's newest laptop rolling onto the market containing a prized piece of Sony kit.</p>
<p>It is the Cell CPU which finds itself as the heart and soul of the Playstation 3, Sony's first thrust in the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray duel which only recently came to a disappointing conclusion. In the wake of HD-DVD's death, for which Toshiba was the inventor and financier, Toshiba rallied its troops and shifted its focus to 1080p upscaling.</p>
<p>The new plan of attack for Toshiba is to chip away at Blu-Ray's rise to preeminence by providing a comparable experience at a fraction of the cost via 1080 upscaling. They have supposed that improvements in the technology can make it an extremely viable competitor, and win a new round in the war by delivering 1080p for 480p prices.</p>
<p>Therefore it comes as something of a surprise for an instrumental piece of the Playstation 3, which helped end HD, to be harnessed in Toshiba's first steps to fight Sony again.</p>
<p>Toshiba is billing the Cell chip has the "Quad Core HD" processor, which is a disarming marketing convention that conceals the irony of Toshiba's newest laptop rolling onto the market containing a prized piece of Sony kit.</p>
<p>It is the Cell CPU which finds itself as the heart and soul of the Playstation 3, Sony's first thrust in the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray duel which only recently came to a disappointing conclusion. In the wake of HD-DVD's death, for which Toshiba was the inventor and financier, Toshiba rallied its troops and shifted its focus to 1080p upscaling.</p>
<p>The new plan of attack for Toshiba is to chip away at Blu-Ray's rise to preeminence by providing a comparable experience at a fraction of the cost via 1080 upscaling. They have supposed that improvements in the technology can make it an extremely viable competitor, and win a new round in the war by delivering 1080p for 480p prices.</p>
<p>Therefore it comes as something of a surprise for an instrumental piece of the Playstation 3, which helped end HD, to be harnessed in Toshiba's first steps to fight Sony again.</p>
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Comments
It is definitely interesting to watch things unfold and see where the Cell and related tech gets implemented as it becomes an affordable solution across many markets.
I'm guessing they are dividing it in four as 1) the main processor, 2) the co-possessor 3)the I/o bus and 4)the data bus. I don't see an advantage in referencing it that way. 9-Core sounds cooler to hipsters, and tech junkies.
In reality since it's only running two threads it's really more like a dual-core then a Quad-core. I'm not sure how Impressive it will be, Unless by Quad-core they are saying they have 4 cell processors, which would be a processor step up from an Xbox360's 3-cell xenon.
I'll bet this will be a linux only laptop, unless microsoft will open win7 to the cell processors.
Edit:Just realized When this was posted.....Looks like this never happened, the G55 ended up with a core2
IBM has also been dabbling in adding Cell technology to pSeries and zSeries offerings (high-end UNIX and mainframes) because of their ability to crunch through large amounts of data at ridiculous speed.
IIRC, POWER7 for pSeries will actually be Cell-based, but I can't remember exactly from the presentations we were shown a few months ago.
I'm guessing the cell's 128bit interface is to account for some of the faster processing of the threads.
Too bad Toshiba jumped to the core 2 for the G55 line; I wonder if they'll ever produce a laptop with a cell processor.
too bad it's hard to program for, If microsoft supported it with win7 and server 2008 it would likely be a popular CPU maybe more so then AMD's line and might give Intel a run for it's money
Yeah, it takes a lot of careful thought to program for a setup like that. I'd almost like to see a system set up so that the OS ran on a classic x86 processor, and number-crunching software that's set up for it, can get pushed to the Cell.
Edit: Ha! Look at that. Reading through the article again, that's exactly what they're doing on this laptop. It has a C2D for regular OS and productivity duties, but offloads the multimedia stuff (which can really exercise the stream-processing elements) to the Cell.
I tried to look up the line it didn't seem to have the cell processor, But I have also read conflicting info on that now. Here is some info from a hands on review that references the laptop having the "Quad Core HD Processor"
Some very interesting stuff but it seems it doesn't quite work that great.
See video