Toshiba Starts Sample Shipping of SpursEngine SE1000 Co-processor

[malware]

Toshiba Corporation today announced the start of sample shipping of the SpursEngine SE1000 (SpursEngine), a high-performance stream processor integrating four Synergistic Processing Element (SPE) cores derived from the "Cell Broadband Engine" (Cell/B.E.). Sample shipping started from today, and Toshiba expects sales of 6 million units within the first three years of the SpursEngine's release.




SpursEngine is a co-processor that integrates a hardware codec for Full HD encoding and decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 streams with four SPEs derived from Cell/B.E. These advanced processing elements offer high performance media streaming capabilities, with a clock frequency of 1.5GHz, while achieving low power consumption range of 10W to 20W.

"We are very pleased to have started sample shipping of SpursEngine" said Yoshio Masubuchi, Director of Toshiba's System LSI Division, Advanced SoC Development Center. "The design of this powerful co-processor is dedicated to bringing the advanced capabilities of the Cell/B.E. to consumer electronics, particularly video processing in digital consumer products. We are sure that SpursEngine will accelerate the market for full-HD applications."

Toshiba will support developers working on SpursEngine applications with a comprehensive reference kit that includes a reference board and essential middleware APIs. The reference board has a PCI-Express edge connector that can connect to an x1 layer slot in a PC. Toshiba will also provide an integrated development environment (SPE compiler, SPE debugger, and performance monitor) and sample applications that demonstrate how to use the provided middleware. With the reference kit, customers can quickly and easily construct an evaluation and development environment and accelerate product development.

Toshiba will further boost the performance and cut the power consumption of the SpursEngine, towards supporting further innovation in products offering new levels of functionality.

Co-operation between Toshiba and the SpursEngine SE1000 Partnerships
Toshiba is developing co-operative relationships with many partner companies in order to develop wide scope video solutions that utilize SpursEngine. For example, we are partnering with Corel Corporation whose headquarters are in Canada; and Taiwan based CyberLink Corporation and Leadtek Research Inc. These companies produce popular video and image processing software and hardware such as graphic board, and will together supply to set manufactures. By working together with these companies and creating a new value chain, many end user can enjoy comfortable digital life by using our board and software bundled with SpursEngine.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Solaris17]

intresting i think i want to sample one..

 

[Ripper3]

This would be something very useful for the film industry, and even for amatures, if they manage to keep the price down. Takes the strain off the CPU and GPU, and uses less power at the same time.
If it's scalable, I can definately see this card being used extensively. Who knows, this might also be popular with HTPC users, if it can manage to replace the need for a powerful, and noisy graphics card just for decoding full HD content. Possibly not its intended market, but it might be successful if well implemented.

 

[3870x2]

Im not so sure these would make it in the mainstream market, maybe in a media PC, if it is cheap enough anyway...

 

[Steevo]

A box stacked with these to run F@H.......mmmmmmmmmmmmm

 

[XooM]

if these have/get F@H support i might just have to fill a motherboard with them...

 

[adrianx]

I belive vista have support for co-processors so....

 

[Ripper3]

So does DOS, so Vista's not exactly on the cutting-edge there, lol.

I'm not sure we'll see them using this for F@H, bu considering the PS3 folds, and this is a derivative of the Cell processor, we might see some experiments with this.

@ 3870x2: Yeah, it's what I meant, if prices are low, and it really does increase performance while decoding, by a significant amount, we might see these in media machines. It makes sense, like I said, less noise heat and lower power consumption than a seperate graphics card.

 

[WarEagleAU]

These are awesome chips, as evident by the power and beauty of the ps3. Its about time they started sampling them. I cant wait for TVs to show up with these chips in them.

 

[FR@NK]

I wonder if one of these could also be use to process physics. It reminded me of the AGEIA PPU when I saw the picture.

From Wikipedia:

Cell Processor vs PPUs
The STI Cell Processor found in the Playstation 3 operates in a manner similar to the Ageia PhysX hardware; its design was driven by similar considerations. Unlike ATI/NVidia's GPGPU solutions, and like the PhysX, this design is more about providing each parallel thread with a large working set and more of the inter-thread communication and control found in a general purpose processor. As such it is very well-suited to physics calculations.

 

[Easy Rhino]

SpursEngine is a co-processor that integrates a hardware codec for Full HD encoding and decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 streams with four SPEs derived from Cell/B.E.

what, no mpeg-4 decoding?? i thought the industry was phasing out mpeg-2 because mpeg-4 and vc-1 were considered better codecs.

 

[TheGuruStud]

what, no mpeg-4 decoding?? i thought the industry was phasing out mpeg-2 because mpeg-4 and vc-1 were considered better codecs.

They should've switched to x264, but that would've made too much sense. They love low compression ratios, apparently.

Wtf with the interface? Not much bandwidth there if you ask me

 

[cdawall]

pci-e 1x should be plenty for this


i think i want one of these im going to contact toshiba and see if i can get one

 

[TheGuruStud]

pci-e 1x should be plenty for this


i think i want one of these im going to contact toshiba and see if i can get one

Then I don't expect a lot of power

 

[cdawall]

Then I don't expect a lot of power

i think it will do fine seeing how most current input cards were on pci which is way slower than 1x

 

[ktr]

I wonder when the qosmio equip cells are coming.

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/ceatec-2...s-cell-broadband-engine-technology-305956.php

 

[TheGuruStud]

i think it will do fine seeing how most current input cards were on pci which is way slower than 1x

What are you talking about, PCI video cards are awesome

 

[jbunch07]

thanks malware!
this is really cool. i ha no idea they were making such things

 

[Mussels]

this is interesting. i like how its basically a video acceleration card for playback... this will really help the poor souls with onboard video and slow processors - i mean a via C3 CPU could manage blu ray with one of these!

 

[BumbRush]

Then I don't expect a lot of power

u know ur comments made me lol....

first off 1x is PLENTY for this kinda card, pci-e 1x is FAR higher bandwith then normal pci 2.x and its got a detocated link to the chipset, this means its bandwith is NOT SHARED, todays videocards could run on 1x without much perf hit as long as u kept it in 1 card mode.

i wana see these get mass support, this is far better then the agea cards where, at least it could do ALOT of diffrent things

oh and nvidia opened up phsyx support so amd/ati and anybody else will beable to support phsyx based games given they put out the drivers for their hardware.

 

[TheGuruStud]

u know ur comments made me lol....

first off 1x is PLENTY for this kinda card, pci-e 1x is FAR higher bandwith then normal pci 2.x and its got a detocated link to the chipset, this means its bandwith is NOT SHARED, todays videocards could run on 1x without much perf hit as long as u kept it in 1 card mode.

i wana see these get mass support, this is far better then the agea cards where, at least it could do ALOT of diffrent things

oh and nvidia opened up phsyx support so amd/ati and anybody else will beable to support phsyx based games given they put out the drivers for their hardware.

250MBps is a lot? I'm sorry, but that doesn't sound like a lot of processing power if its throughput can't exceed that. That's over TWICE as slow as AGP 2x.
Maybe I'm just expecting too much from NEW technology. Pci-e 8x would sound more reasonable.

Midrange cards could run on pci-e x4 reasonably, but that's about it.

 

[Mussels]

its been proven at one point toms did a test on it. the 8800GTX and ultras used about PCI-E 12x, below that they took large performance hits - 250MB/s is overkill when it comes to a decoding acceleration device, but not much when it comes to ENcoding.

This card is more aimed at decoding in my opinion, perhaps a 4x or 8x card will come out later for the encoding nuts.

 

[cdawall]

250MBps is a lot? I'm sorry, but that doesn't sound like a lot of processing power if its throughput can't exceed that. That's over TWICE as slow as AGP 2x.
Maybe I'm just expecting too much from NEW technology. Pci-e 8x would sound more reasonable.

Midrange cards could run on pci-e x4 reasonably, but that's about it.

this is plenty fast for encoding/decoding have you ever seen a video encoder on anything higher than pci-e 1x? think that there might be a reason for that like i don't know it has enough bandwidth?

 

[Darren]

Interesting, I would certainly love to see some benchmarks. I like the concept of add-on cards but after physics cards offered relatively no performance increase and sometimes a degrade in performance I feel somewhat apathetic towards this co-processor idea. What makes Co-processor add-ons any different to physics card add-ons apart from the market consumer being different and a snapper name?

 

[TheGuruStud]

So it can only decode 1 stream of 1920 x 1080 / 60 uncompressed at a time?

As much as they hype this cell shit, you'd think it could do 5 at once lol

That would be overkill, but I want to see some benchmarks. It probably sucks.