Hands flailing wildly with Toshiba's SpursEngine laptop

Toshiba's Cell processor-based SpursEngine B.E. was on full display at CES, with a variety of tech demos to show off its power. From HD video transcoding, facial recognition, or the always popular gesture-control Toshiba's baby went through a series of workouts, trying to be the third teammate, with your CPU & GPU, to speed heavy-duty processing. Featuring only four cores -- half the number found in the PS3 -- it handled all tasks thrown its way, check out the gallery to find out how the power of the Cell could help your PC in the future.

Gallery: Toshiba's SpursEngine B.E.

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[Azayzel @ Jan 11th 2008 10:56AM]

Now this has some serious potential, especially in terms of heavy-duty number-crunching research! It will be interesting to see how this bad boy will pan out at the university level once it's made easily available.

[Mike @ Jan 11th 2008 11:05AM]

Isn't the PS3 9 physical, 18 logical, core-wise that is? Making 4 less than half, not really trying to correct, just re-assure myself.

[Jagster @ Jan 11th 2008 2:43PM]

Sorry to burst your bubble but PS3 only has 1 core. That core has 1 general purpose PPC and 7 SPE's (8 SPE's are physically on the chip but only 7 are enabled to inprove manufacturing yields). The SPE's are somewhat like programable DSP's but nothing like a normal CPU.

[Extinction @ Jan 12th 2008 4:15AM]

PS3's Cell has a dual threaded PPC core, and 7 SPUs. SPUs are NOTHING like DSPs. They are completely programmable processors, and are far more similar to normal CPUs than DSPs. Whoever told you they were DSPs did no research.

[Pro7 @ Jan 11th 2008 11:08AM]

If they can't put it into a notebook and let me play games for under 1300 EUR, then I don't care.

[bulldog7071 @ Jan 12th 2008 1:20AM]

truly the most insightful reply on any laptop blog to date

[Zeus.:God @ Jan 11th 2008 11:09AM]

That is absolute utter bullshit. The PS3 has 1 core! NOT 8. This is pretty bad that a popular gadget blog is helping spread this common misinformation.

The PS3 has 1 physical core, with 8 synergistic processing elements.

This processor, if this is correct, has 4 physical cores.

[cduran01 @ Jan 11th 2008 11:19AM]

Actually the PS3 Cell has 2 PPC cores and 8 SPE's, but you are right SPE's are not cores. Cores are full blown processors while the SPE's are Specialized Processing Elements.

[cduran01 @ Jan 11th 2008 11:25AM]

Oooops I correct myself, it has only one PPC core (confused it with the 360 processor.

[Zebulunite @ Jan 11th 2008 11:31AM]

Actually, according to Wikipedia, the SpursEngine contains 4 SPEs (running at 1.5GHz, verses 3.2GHz in the PS3) and no on chip CPU (I.e. does not contain a PPE like the PS3)

So basically:

Cell in PS3 – 1 PPE and 7 SPEs running at 3.2 GHz
SpursEngine – 4 SPEs running at 1.5 GHz (plus some additional components to enable better communication between the 4 SPEs and the host computer)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpursEngine

[Zeus.:God @ Jan 11th 2008 11:32AM]

Actually, its "PPE"- Physical Processing Element, which is the same thing as a core. The 360's Xenon has 3 PPEs, or 3 cores. The Cell has 1 PPE, or 1 core, but has 8 SPEs.

[Kenban @ Jan 11th 2008 11:34AM]

The PS3 has only 7 SPU's the 8th is disabled to improve yields.

The 360 has 3 PPC cores.

[Zeus.:God @ Jan 11th 2008 11:35AM]

Ok, so I was wrong about that. It seems other sources are calling the SPEs cores as well. Apparently this is just 4 SPEs, which would mean it has half that of the PS3's 8 SPEs. However, this is also not a full blown processor as it doesn't have a core.

Also, to the poster above, the term is "PPE"- or Physical Processing Element. A PPE is a core. The 360's Xenon has 3 PPEs, or 3 cores. The PS3's Cell has 1 PPE, or 1 core, and 8 SPEs, or Synergistic Processing Elements. Not full cores, just "assistants".

[Zeus.:God @ Jan 11th 2008 11:37AM]

No, the 8th WAS disabled when it first came out. Well, it technically wasn't disabled, it was dedicated to only the PS3's operating firmware. In an update, however, months ago, the 8th has been opened up to in-game processing, and not just the firmware.

[Kenban @ Jan 11th 2008 11:49AM]

Zeus the 8th has its fuse blown there is no way to turn it back on through software. The 7th SPE is used by the OS and the 6th can be taken at any time by the OS. It would not surprise me if Sony was able to scale back the OS so it would only use a single SPE and never need to use a second (I have not been paying enough attention to know if it happened or not). But the system effectively only has 7 SPE's.

The 360's GPU has something similar there is one set of 16 pipes disabled to improve yields.

[Kenban @ Jan 11th 2008 11:49AM]

Zeus the 8th has its fuse blown there is no way to turn it back on through software. The 7th SPE is used by the OS and the 6th can be taken at any time by the OS. It would not surprise me if Sony was able to scale back the OS so it would only use a single SPE and never need to use a second (I have not been paying enough attention to know if it happened or not). But the system effectively only has 7 SPE's.

The 360's GPU has something similar there is one set of 16 pipes disabled to improve yields.

[Zeus.:God @ Jan 12th 2008 8:07PM]

Dude, do you research anything? The 8th cell (SPE) is used for the OS. Not the 7th. In an update, the 8th SPE was opened up for use with in-game code.

Also, the 360's GPU has 48 pixel/shader pipelines- all are usable, functional, and operational, so I don't understand how you can come up with that.

[Kazriko @ Jan 13th 2008 9:33PM]

Uh, Zeus... I think you need to do your research more. In a standard Cell chip, there are 8 SPE cores and 1 PPE core. If these are undamaged, then the processor can be used for any of the tasks that they use Cell chips for. Medical visualization, scientific supercomputing, etc. If they use one of these in a PS3, they physically toast one of the cores so it cannot be used.

The PS3 only uses 7 out of 8 SPEs for purposes of increasing the yield of their processors. That way if they get a core with 1 spe already damaged with a flaw in the silicon, they toast the already damaged one so they can salvage the processor that would otherwise be defective. The core number that is toasted isn't fixed and could be any core on the chip.

The OS reserves 1, so the games have access to the PPE, and 6 SPE cores.

This is also why the processors they sell in non-PS3 systems are more expensive than the PS3, they have all 8 SPEs undamaged and active.

[Zeus.:God @ Jan 11th 2008 11:11AM]

I would also like to add that the SPEs are not cores- they're "cells", hence the name of the processor.

[Superprime @ Jan 11th 2008 11:29AM]

But from a programming perspective they are considered extra CPUs

[Superprime @ Jan 11th 2008 11:29AM]

But from a programming perspective they are considered extra CPUs

[Zeus.:God @ Jan 11th 2008 11:39AM]

No, they aren't considered as CPUs or cores from a programming standpoint, as they can't handle raw code. The PPE has to pretty much spoon feed it code for it to do anything, and it doesn't do it very well.

[Kazriko @ Jan 11th 2008 2:57PM]

Actually, if you look at much of the stuff that Insomniac has been doing with the Cell processor, they've been running the SPEs on their own, having them use the EIB network to fetch the memory from main without requiring processing power on the PPE.

The SPEs are full processors with direct access to 256k of very fast ram and a token ring style network to the other SPEs and system including the ram and other external interfaces. They're actually MORE than cores, being entire full network nodes in a super computer arrangement.

[Extinction @ Jan 12th 2008 4:19AM]

SPUs are cores (according to IBM, the guys who invented the chip and all). Where did you get the idea otherwise?

[Zeus.:God @ Jan 12th 2008 8:09PM]

SPEs have never ever been cores, because cores are physical processor. SPEs are not.

[Kazriko @ Jan 13th 2008 9:16PM]

Now you're just tacking on arbitrary requirements that most cores on multicore processors can't attain. While it's true that the original Pentium-D had two separate physical processors, all others have at least two processors on a single die and that aren't physically separate processors. The AMD multicores have always been on the same die and each core relied on the rest of the circuitry on the chip to operate, they couldn't run individually if you took them away from the other cores and memory controller circuity. The cores in an AMD chip are connected by a network crossbar, similar to how the cores in the Cell are connected by a EIB network. Intel is the only company that still connects their multicore processors via the frontside bus so they could theoretically run independently if you hacked one off.

The SPEs have memory, they have dual-issue pipelines, they have arithmetic units, they have load and store units, they have vector processing units, and they have a network interface to external devices and other SPE cores. Sounds like it more than meets the minimum requirements for a processor core to me.

[MrLegend @ Jan 11th 2008 11:19AM]

Ah yes, now if only they would work on getting this out faster and give up on HD-DVD. :)

[telepheedian @ Jan 11th 2008 11:28AM]

I just think it's funny that the cell processor is being used to run hd-dvd here, vs. blu-ray.

[spm.peapot @ Jan 11th 2008 11:36AM]

Porn industry rejoices! Just imagine what gesture-control can do... in a bed room.

[Mikey @ Jan 11th 2008 11:43AM]

why does the main pic remind me of Terminator 2?

[Zebulunite @ Jan 11th 2008 11:50AM]

Here's a better diagram showing the differences between a full-blown Cell CPU and the SpursEngine. Note, as I said in my previous post, that the SPEs in the SpursEngine are running at 1.5GHz, verses 3.2GHz in the PS3.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/09/20/toshibas-cell-derived-spursengine-chip-to-process-video/

[buzzbean @ Jan 11th 2008 12:37PM]

This is running Vista. Sony let us put Vista on our PS3's

[Extinction @ Jan 12th 2008 4:20AM]

It's running vista cause it also has an x86-based processor as well. The Cell is being used like a GPU

[buzzbean @ Jan 11th 2008 12:37PM]

This is running Vista. Sony let us put Vista on our PS3's

[Extinction @ Jan 12th 2008 4:16AM]

SPUs are cores. Where did you get the idea otherwise?