Digital Home Thoughts: Toshiba's 4-Core SpursEngine Chip: I Want One!

"Toshiba has taken the final step towards launch of a high-performance chip derived from the powerful Cell processor that powers Sony's PlayStation 3 games console. On Tuesday it began offering samples of the chip, called the SpursEngine SE1000, to electronics companies ahead of a commercial launch likely later this year. The SpursEngine is a co-processor -- that's a chip designed to sit alongside a main processor in a system and handle heavy jobs like real-time graphics processing and video manipulation. Inside the chip are four processor cores of the same type used in the Cell chip and a hardware codec for encoding and decoding high-definition MPEG2 and H.264 video streams. It runs at 1.5GHz and consumes between 10 watts and 20 watts of power, said Toshiba."


Photo courtesy of Engadget.
This news is a couple of weeks old, but when I discovered it I thought it was still interesting enough to post about. Anyone that does video encoding knows that there's no such thing as a CPU that's fast enough - encoding to highly-compressed formats such as h.264 take an especially long time. I've picked h.264 as my codec of choice for archiving my video reviews, and it's quite ridiculous how long it takes to encode a 10 minute video to h.264 when I'm using a fast Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme CPU running at 2.97 Ghz. Hardware acceleration, tweaked specifically for certain codecs (such as h.264) is the answer here - when a chip is designed to accelerate a specific encoding function, it can do a much better job than a general-purpose CPU, even if the CPU is faster overall. I'd happily pay an extra $100 to get a chip like this in my desktop or laptop PC - I hope we'll see companies offering it. In the meantime, I need to look at one of these...