Toshiba laptop touts 'quad-core' processor

Toshiba's 18.4-inch Qosmio G55 laptop uses a quad-core processor--but not the Intel or AMD variety.

Toshiba SpursEngine processor is offered with the Qosmio G55 laptop

(Credit: Toshiba)

The "Quad-Core HD Processor" used in the Qosmio G55--due mid-July--is based on the SpursEngine which is derived from the Cell Broadband Engine, a multicore chip architecture jointly developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. The Cell architecture, in turn, is derived from IBM's Power Architecture. Today, IBM uses the Cell processor in a line of blade servers.

The four processing elements inside the chip have a clock frequency of 1.5GHz, while boasting a relatively low power envelope of 10 to 20 watts. Typical mobile Intel processors have a power envelope of 35 watts.

The SpursEngine can deliver up to 48 GFlops (billion Floating point operations per second) or 12GFlops per processing element. Every element has 256KB of integrated memory, according to Toshiba. And the processor excels at high-definition video encoding and decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 (MPEG-4) streams.

Click photo for gallery on Toshiba's new notebook lineup.

(Credit: Toshiba)

(Update: the Qosmio G55's main processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo--it will be offered with a "Montevina" Centrino 2 processor --while the graphics chip is an Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT. The SpursEngine is a co-processor that accelerates certain multimedia tasks.)

As discussed in an earlier CNET Crave post, Toshiba is touting the Cell processor's special features. The Japanese company says that the processor achieves what many high-end graphics processing units (GPUs) from the likes of Nvidia and AMD now feature: transcoding acceleration. Transcoding, or converting--movies, for example--from one format to another, can be extremely time consuming, sometimes taking hours.

A typical 1GB movie can be converted--or transcoded--in less time with the help of the SpursEngine processor: what might ordinarily take an hour can be done in as little as ten minutes, the company said in a statement. This is a feature that Nvidia is also promoting aggressively on its newest GTX 280 graphics processor announced Monday. In short, offloading multimedia-intensive tasks to a specialized processor (like an Nvidia GPU or Toshiba SpursEngine) can speed up many common tasks dramatically.

Toshiba is touting other uses too. The processor allows the user to pause, fast-forward, and rewind a movie "just by moving your hands." Toshiba calls it "gesture control."

And this is what Toshiba says about a "Face Navigation" feature. "Find that face--or that unforgettable scene in home movies and Hollywood films...The new Toshiba Face Navigation feature captures facial expressions so you can quickly locate the part of the video you want to see."

[MadLyb]

So, is this processor replacing the CPU or GPU or working along side those processors. The article wasn't clear.

[noam sayne]

It's the main processor. The G55 is the first laptop to use a Cell-based processor. The PS3 uses a similar one.

[finalfanoffkey]

G55 uses a Core 2 Duo process, GeForce 9600M GT as GPU. The SpursEngine is just an add-on.

[mikeroo1]

From what I understand is that the Quad Core HD Processor is complimentary to the processor, which is probably Intel, but the story doesn't say for sure. It's purpose it to ease the massive burden that's placed on the CPU during processing intensive tasks such as encoding. If the 10X faster claim is true... that's amazing!

[amandachuck]

Well, a high end graphics card with drivers written for it correctly can do the same thing these days, but it consumes a lot of power and requires it's own massive memory, etc. Apple is using the GeForce in the new iMac for that purpose, and I can attest that transcoding speed is amazing compared to my other Macs with Core Duo and Core 2 Duo processors, especially transcoding to MP4 (not as fast going to H.264, but still much faster than before). What this proposes to do is take that load off the GPU, allowing for "integrated graphics" but still blazing speeds on multi-media, one would guess. That means taking the load off of the CPU and GPU and low power use, of key importance to a laptop.

[Chuckaluckles]

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[easonchan]

bope it's just another gpu in there.