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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Outline of Prototype
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Processor Four SPEs
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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
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Memory Interface For working memory (XDR(TM) DRAM), data width of
32 bits
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Hardware Video Codec (1) Full HD compatible MPEG-2 encoder and
decoder
(2) Full HD compatible H.264 encoder and decoder
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PCI Express Interface x4, x2, x1 link support
Compliant with PCI Express(TM) base
specification revision 1.1
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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.
