Tokyo (Japan) – Today we got first glimpse on Toshiba’s new high-def strategy, which most certainly will revolve its stripped-down Cell processor called Spurs Engine (SE). The SE1000 chip will make its commercial debut in two new notebooks, which are expected to be based on Intel’s Montevina platform, and promises “over-the-top multimedia” experience with real-time video encoding.
Despite initial high-hopes for a wide-scale adoption of the Cell BE processor, the only mass-market application use the technology remains Sony’s Playstation 3 game console. Toshiba will take another shot at the architecture and build the Cell-derived SE1000 chip as a floating point accelerator unit into the upcoming Qosmio F50 and G50 notebooks.
Fe details about these notebooks, which are scheduled – just in line for the Montevina platform debut – for a mid-July launch, are known so far, but what sticks out of the product pages is the company’s “new quad-core HD processor”. Compared to the PS3’s 3.2 GHz Cell BE processor with eight SPE cores, the 65 nm SE1000 has only four active SPE cores.
The accelerator appears to be based on Toshiba’s recently outlined SE1000 reference design, which also includes 128 MB of XDR DRAM memory. If that is the case, then it is clear that the chip will connect via PCIe to the system, but we do not know which software will be able to use the capabilities of the chip. Since Toshiba mentions that the SE1000 will enable real-time video encoding, however, we would guess that the company will ship the notebook with fine-tuned video software such as Corel’s recently demonstrated DVD Movie Factory.
According to Toshiba, the processor will also enable users to use hand gesture controls to start, pause and rewind your entertainment, upscale DVDs from standard to high-definition and find certain parts of movies with face indexing. The downside of this entire horsepower, of course, is power consumption. The SE1000 is rated at a maximum power consumption of 20 watts, which is considerable in today’s notebook world.
Pricing of the F50 (a 15.4” notebook that will include a GPS module) and the G50 (18.4”) are expected to begin in the $2500 neighborhood and top out and well above $3000.
And interesting side-note of this SE1000 chip is the indication that this will be the hardware that will drive Toshiba’s HD strategy. Since the company dropped out of the HD race with Blu-ray and the company stated that it will not manufacture Blu-ray players, it appears to be obvious that the SE1000 chip may be the main pillar of the firm’s video strategy. Earlier this month, the company said that it will compete with Blu-ray with upgraded DVD players, which the company claims will be able to generate HD images from standard sources.