The “Quad-Core HD Processor” quad laptop used in the Qosmio G55 laptop is based on the SpursEngine which is derived from the Cell Broadband Engine, a multicore chip architecture jointly developed by IBM, Toshiba & Sony. The Cell architecture, in turn, is derived from IBM’s Power Architecture. Now, IBM uses the Cell processor in a line of blade servers.
The four processing elements inside the chip have 1.5GHz of clock frequency, while boasting a relatively low power envelope of 10 – 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 H.264 (MPEG-4) and MPEG-2 streams.
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.”
Incoming search terms for this article:
define quad core processor (1)
how to turn on the quad processor on toshiba laptop (1)
laptop cpu gflops (1)
reviews for Toshiba laptop quad-core (1)
toshiba laptop processors (1)
this 17-inch awesome notebook features Intel’s newest line of quad-core processors the Q6600 and the Q6700,Named the D900C Phantom-X, dual NVIDIA 7950GTX GPUs running in SLI,up to 750GB of internal HDD space,In it’s Full Extra state this Notebook can cost up to 9.000$, a Blu-ray optical drive, up to 4GB of DDR2 RAM, and a variety of ports including USB 2.0, FireWire, DVI, S-Video, a multicard reader, optical and analog audio in / out, and a gigabit Ethernet jack for good measure along with integrated Bluetooth 2.0, 802.11a/b/g, stereo speakers, a built-in microphone, 1.3 Mpixel webcam, an optional TV tuner and many many more.