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PS3 Cell Chip In A Laptop Is Kinda Fun

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News Posted: Fri, Jan 11 2008 1:22 PM

Just like the rest of us nerds, Toshiba got to wondering what would happen if you put a Playstation 3 Cell processor into a laptop. They put one in one of their Qosimo G45 notebooks, which already sports an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU.  They've named the system the Spurs engine. It allows the laptop to react to user hand gestures; scan through all your video files for particular faces and sort them into thumbnail lists; allows you to take a picture of your face and digitally alter it in various ways in 3D; and maybe most interesting, lets you change standard-definition video into sweet, sweet, 1080p.

Toshiba had four demos running, the first of which transformed standard-definition video into 1080p. This takes any grubby-looking 640x480-pixel video -- of the sort you might record with a mobile phone or digital camera -- applies some hardcore image processing, and spits it out a few hours later as full 1080p. The effect was extremely impressive, and proves that you can, to some extent, polish a turd. Toshiba says it's possible to do this using an ordinary Intel Core processor, but the Spurs system speeds things up considerably -- what would take 24 hours with an ordinary laptop can be done in just three hours with the aid of Spurs.

You can watch a video of a demo of the system here; it's worth it just to see the show visitor right behind the host digging around in his nose, unaware of the camera.



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Crisis Causer replied on Fri, Jan 11 2008 5:02 PM

Is it all the cores of the PS3 one, too? 

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Old School replied on Fri, Jan 11 2008 5:50 PM
Hi CC-Thanks for reading and commenting.

The Cell processor they used only had half the cores that the processor used in a PS3 has --4 of 8.
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Der Meister replied on Sat, Jan 12 2008 4:24 PM
The 4 core's they used are 50% slower than the PS3's cores and like stated above it only had 4 cores verses 8.

All in all very cool, i would love to see a PC utilization of the cell, for both CPU and GPU. I think it could do wonders.

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