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Toshiba to Demonstrate Prototype of New ''SpursEngine(TM)'' Processor at CEATEC JAPAN 2007



    Toshiba Corporation today announced development of the
    "SpursEngine(TM)", a high-performance stream processor integrating
    Synergistic Processing Element (SPE) cores derived from the Cell
    Broadband Engine(TM) (Cell/B.E.(TM)). The SpursEngine is expressly
    designed to bring the powerful capabilities of the Cell/B.E.
    technology to consumer electronics, and to take video processing in
    digital consumer products to new levels of realism and image quality.

    The prototype of SpursEngine will be unveiled at CEATEC JAPAN
    2007, at Makuhari Messe, Japan, from October 2nd. Notebook PCs
    integrating SpursEngine will be used in the world's first public
    demonstration of the processor's capabilities in 3D image processing
    and manipulation: real-time transformations of hair styles and makeup
    that instantaneously recognize and process changes in position, angle,
    and facial expression, and render them as computer graphics. Toshiba
    also plans to demonstrate concept notebook PCs integrating the
    SpursEngine.

    SpursEngine, a co-processor that works in cooperation with a host
    CPU, fuses Cell/B.E.'s high performance multi-core technology with
    Toshiba's advanced image processing technology to perform stream
    processing of video sources -- image recognition and processing -- at
    the increasingly sophisticated level required by new generations of
    digital consumer products.

    The new co-processor integrates four of Cell/B.E.'s high
    performance RISC core SPEs, half the number of the full configuration,
    plus hardware dedicated to decoding and encoding MPEG-2 and H.264
    video. By combining the high level, real time processing software of
    the SPEs with the hardware video codecs, the SpursEngine realizes an
    optimized balance of processing flexibility and low power consumption.
    The prototype of SpursEngine operates at a clock frequency of 1.5GHz
    and consumes power at 10 to 20 watts.

    SpursEngine also adopts XDR(TM) DRAM memory as working memory,
    achieving support of high data transfer rates, for large volumes of
    media data.

    Toshiba will bring SpursEngine to market after CEATEC, for
    application in various digital consumer products, and for use by
    customers and Toshiba itself, as soon as it completes specifications
    for commercial production.

    About Cell Broadband Engine

    The revolutionary Cell/B.E., jointly developed by IBM, Sony Group
    and Toshiba, is a breakthrough design featuring a central processing
    core based on IBM's Power Architecture technology and eight
    synergistic processing elements (SPE). Cell/B.E. brings an unseen
    level of broadband processing power to digital products.

    About SPE

    Synergistic Processor Element is a processor core that has high
    performance floating point computation capability with an original
    instruction set architecture, for optimized processing of multiple
    media applications.

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    *T
    Outline of Prototype
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Processor Four SPEs
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    SPE Fully compatible with SPU instruction set
    architecture of Cell/B.E. (SIMD RISC processor
    architecture, 8/16/32bit integer, single/double
    precision floating point), 256KB local storage,
    embedded DMAC function/MMU function
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Memory Interface For working memory (XDR(TM) DRAM), data width of
    32 bits
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Hardware Video Codec (1) Full HD compatible MPEG-2 encoder and
    decoder
    (2) Full HD compatible H.264 encoder and decoder
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    PCI Express Interface x4, x2, x1 link support
    Compliant with PCI Express(TM) base
    specification revision 1.1
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    *T

    1: XDR(TM) DRAM is a trademark of Rambus Inc. in the United States
    and other countries.

    2: SpursEngine and the logo are trademarks of Toshiba Corporation.

    3: Cell Broadband Engine and Cell/B.E. are trademarks of Sony
    Computer Entertainment Inc.