Toshiba Release SpursEngine Samples
Category: Digital Photography/VideoPosted: April 8, 2008 08:20AM
Author: jammin
If you haven't read anything about Toshiba's SpursEngine graphics co-processor then here are a few things you might want to know. The SpursEngine is derived from the infamous Cell processor found in PS3 consoles, containing 4 Cell type cores and a hardware codec for dealing with high definition video streams. This piece of technology is capable of some rather neat things, as Toshiba has demonstrated at trade shows. High speed HD encoding and decoding would be a boon for those heavily into video editing, while the ability to upscale standard definition content (relatively convincingly it would seem) through the use of a super-resolution algorithm may be exciting for those looking to get more out of lower quality sources. The SpursEngine also opens up the possibility for real time video manipulation and gestural recognition. Toshiba has started shipping samples of the chips and expects the commercial chip to sell for around $50 in bulk quantities. It will likely find a home in graphics add-in cards to start with and consumer electronic devices some time after that.
