Leadtek intros SpursEngine-packing PCI-E card
By Donald Melanson 
posted October 3rd 2008 1:37PM
posted October 3rd 2008 1:37PM
Well, it looks like Toshiba isn't just keeping its Cell-based SpursEngine chip confined to its laptops and super-resolution DVD players, as Leadtek has now also taken the wraps off a PCI-E card that'll let you add some of that "faster than real-time" HD video transcoding to your desktop PC. Dubbed the WinFast PxVC1100, the card promises to encode and decode H.264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video with ease (and entirely in hardware), and it includes 128MB of 1.6GHz XDR memory to aid in the process. Just don't expect it to come cheap, as the card's apparently set to demand ¥30,000 (or $286) when it hits Japan later this month.
[Via Custom PC]
[Via Custom PC]
Wow, that sounds pretty cool, Can you give more info on how you managed to do that? That alone makes me wanna buy a Ps3...
It's been a long while since the actual install, so my original reference material is long gone from what I can find.
A quick look through where the Linux-on-Cell community is though gave me this:
http://psubuntu.com/tag/tutorial/
^That should be the best place for a tutorial on getting an actual flavor of Ubuntu to install
Then there's:
http://psubuntu.com/tag/development/
Which should help get you on track with testing the latest cell-enabled kernels.
From what I can surmise, the reference in the previous link to "Geoff's Cell Patches" refers to these:
http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/geoff/cell/
And since you can only post three links, there's a part two of this response coming next ;-)
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In a nutshell, from looking at the tutorials and such, you're going to be doing a normal installation of Ubuntu on the system, and once that's all done, THEN go and patch the kernel with Geoff's patches to enable full Cell support within the OS.
Hope that has been of some help to get you started, and if it does take off for you, and you're interested in writing your own code that takes advantage of the Cell architecture, then there's:
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/
for you as well. One caveat of the IBM link is that their dev tools, at least when I was playing with it, require the use of Fedora...so make of that what you will.
Also, if you're interested in the more technical aspects of what makes up the Cell architecture and how to make use of it in programming, there's a click-through presentation of it that you can find here:
http://www.research.scea.com/research/html/CellGDC05/
Best of luck to you!
There is actually a very good discussion about this card on the PCPer podcast: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=411
I think what we need is a comparison test between a variety of processors, graphics cards running CUDA, and this cell processor. I don't know if there is any transcoding software with support for all these things (I very much doubt it at this stage) but once there is some tech site needs to compare them all at which point people will actually know if this is worth it for video work.
http://www.badaboomit.com/
I'm not that familiar with how these add-on cards work. Do you need to use their software or can any software like handbrake or AGK also take advantage of the card?
They need drivers which would call the card similar to any video, network or sound card. Think of it this way you put a video card into a system. No drivers nothing but it'll boot up and be there. OS detects it and uses either low level basic drivers for some functionality or you then install the actual drivers so the OS can fully utilize it. Then throw in a opengl or directX title for the fully specified coding to be pushed through the gpu. So until the software you run is recoded to take advantage of the add-on card it's useless in this instance.
Me likes. Do you have any idea how much time this is going to save me? I am into 3D cinematography. It requires two HD camcorders (one for the left eye, one for the right), and I join them together in Sony Vegas. Rendering a single minute of my video from AVCHD to h.264 requires around an hour of encoding time. I'm in love. I wonder if this would work in an SLI configuration? Anyway, someone in a previous post that cards like this already exist. Anyone know of specific examples?
That's exactly what this card is for. I would think that by now most pc users have a graphic card that already runs HI DEF content. The major problem is the enconding part. I have a HI DEF camcorder and it takes hours to render my edited videos which makes the whole process very counter productive and even the fastest CPUs (I have a quad-core system) can't do encoding jobs at a good acceptable speed. This card - given it delivers what it promises - will make the lives of very frustated HI DEF camcorders owners a little easier and also make digital video editing more accessible to everyone. Way to go! I think it's well worth the money. Now if ATI or NVIDIA come up with a better solution that in my opinion should've been implemented years ago I'll just upgrade my existing video card.
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When i first saw one of these cards in a magazine advertised here in Australia I wanted one. i still can't find a local reseller. Looks like the card would be to expensive what with the current dollar value and exchange rate etc.
i can always dream.