Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 23rd Jun 2008 17:34 UTC
The first laptops to make use of the SpursEngine, a multimedia co-processor derived from the Cell chip that powers the PlayStation 3, will go on sale in Japan in July. Toshiba will launch its Qosmio G50 and F40 machines with the chip, which contains four of the "Synergistic Processing Elements" from the Cell Broadband Engine processor. The Cell chip used in the PlayStation 3 has eight of the SPE cores plus a Power PC main processor. The SPE cores perform the heavy number-crunching that makes the console's graphics so stunning. The SpursEngine SE1000 will work in much the same way in the laptops. The operating system will run on an Intel Core 2 Duo chip and the SpursEngine will be called on to handle processor-intensive tasks, such as processing of high-definition video. This arrangement means the laptop should be capable of some tricks that haven't been seen on machines until now.
Thread beginning with comment 319776
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2006-01-16
Ok, now I was talking about the other way round (specific question from the OP).
Sure you can do many processsing tasks with today's high end and perhaps even mid-range GPUs. They have several APIs for that already.
But the question is how efficient that is. If you have a powerful GPU lying around in your PC doing nothing special anyway, it is a great idea to utilize it. If you don't have that per-se, which is especially the case for laptop computers, it's a different case. Then it could be worth it for several reasons to only use an integrated GPU and instead try these nifty Cell SPUs.
Edited 2008-06-24 16:43 UTC