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Toshiba Uses Cell Chip In Consumer Laptop

Posted by kdawson on Fri Jan 11, 2008 10:26 AM
from the thinking-outside-the-cell dept.
Portables Hardware
An anonymous reader sends us to CNET UK's Crave blog, where they report on a demo from CES. So far the only uses for Cell chips have been research stuff and the PS3. Now Toshiba has put a Cell chip into a consumer laptop; they are calling it the Spurs Engine. "The system was demonstrated in modified Qosmio G45 laptops, each of which uses a standard Intel Core 2 Duo CPU in addition to a Cell chip with four 1.5GHz synergistic processing elements (SPEs). Toshiba had four demos running... Demo 3... scans all your movie files, recognizes faces, and creates thumbnails of those faces. You can then click the thumbnails to watch scenes with those faces in, or compile them in a separate playlist."
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Submission: Toshiba Uses Cell Chip in Consumer Laptop by Anonymous Coward
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  • A good PPC laptop using a Cell as it's main processor would be good, not just a hybrid using one as a co-processor...
    • Because the consumer wants to run Microsoft Windows and applications made for Microsoft Windows on it. You can't just compile an entire software catalog to PPC within a week. However, this could "Spur" the development of applications for the Cell running on Windows and with growing adoption Microsoft might even start porting some of its own libraries. History might be in the making. Watch it unfold.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by $RANDOMLUSER (804576)
        Yeah, they were SO serious about NT on Alpha ;-)
        • Don't forget PPC and MIPS (NT4 was released for those platforms aw well).

          • Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop? (Score:5, Informative)

            by LWATCDR (28044) on Friday January 11 2008, @11:29AM (#22000308) Homepage Journal
            Actually for a long time Microsoft wrote NT on the MIPS and ported to Intel. They felt that if they didn't portability would suffer. Microsoft was actually pretty serious about NT on the Alpha, MIPS, and PPC for a long while. The problem was that nobody else was. Windows developers tended to write for Win95 because that was the big market and many users of the MIPS, Alpha, and PPC where sticking with Unix since they felt it was a better server.
            Microsoft finally just gave up since 99.9% of there users where on Intel.
            Since Intel and AMD have pretty much killed the Alpha and MIPS on servers it worked out well for them.

              • Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop? (Score:4, Insightful)

                by LWATCDR (28044) on Friday January 11 2008, @02:28PM (#22003202) Homepage Journal
                The 386 did have Unix even then. There where versions of Unix for the 286 for goodness sakes.
                But lets face it. Are you going to spend the money for a MIPS or Alpha to recompile and test a program that you may or may not sell?
                Are you going to buy an OS that doesn't have any software to speak of and my never?
                NT dies on those CPUs for the same reason that BeOS died on Intel.

                • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                  by Bri3D (584578)
                  That's not a coprocessor. Old Alphas just needed a different BIOS with ARC support for compatibility. Later AlphaServers supported NT out-of-the-box with no labelled chip, custom BIOS, or differences at all from OpenVMS/OSF/1 or Linux support. I know this because I have an AlphaServer 4/266 running NT right now.
      • Yes it's unlikely from a commercial perspective while Windows, historically tied to x86(64), dominates.

        But... Linux works [wikipedia.org]. Supposing they can get the power consumption to reasonable levels, it could theoretically be a candidate CPU for a future OLPC [wikipedia.org], which already runs Linux, especially given the fallout with Intel. Given Toshiba are using the Cell as a co-processor in addition to a regular CPU, I figure they must have revolutionary battery technology around the corner!

        Then there's Apple. With universal

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by TeknoHog (164938)
      IIRC, the Cell uses way too much power for sensible laptop use. I'm waiting for PWRficient instead -- 2 GHz PPC at max 7 W per core.

      • Re:How about a regular Cell based laptop? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by default luser (529332) on Friday January 11 2008, @03:18PM (#22004118) Journal
        IIRC, the Cell uses way too much power for sensible laptop use.

        Apparently, you do not know how CMOS devices work. The power consumption of the chip is directly proportional to the capacitive load and the frequency, and is proportional to the square of the voltage.

        Concering only the SPE power consumption, which is the majority of power used by a Cell chip:

        If x represents the power consumption of a 7-SPE chip running at 3.2 GHz...

        If you cut the number of SPEs from 7 to 4, your capacitive load is cut to %57 of the original, or 0.57 * x.

        If you again cut the frequency from 3.2 GHz to 1.5 GHz, you get a power consumption reduction of 1.5 / 3.2. Your total power consumption after capacitive load and frequency changes is 0.26 * x.

        The PPE portion of the chi[p will see power consumption reduced by half because of frequency.

        FINALLY: a reduced operating frequency means you can reduce the voltage, and this is where you can see some impressive gains. Just to get an idea of the differences in voltages, here is a link to a voltage vs speed graph for each SPE [realworldtech.com], from Sony engineers. You could potentially operate the Cell at 1.5 GHz at a very low threshold voltage, giving you a %20-30 reduced power consumption.

        So, after all that, you have a chip that runs on less than %20 of the power of its big brother (estimated 60-80w), so this chip is around 10-15w, which is quite practical for four 128-bit vector processors plus a PPE.

        Not that there's anything the Cell could really do effectively for a PC. For parallel processing, we already have dual 128-bit SSE units on the Core2 Duo processors, which comes within fighting range of four SPEs clocked at a paltry 1.5 GHz. And of course, most of there pipe-dream uses will get held-back by slow I/O on a home computer or laptop (like ALL the examples uses for this chip listed in the article), so there's really no need for all that processing power.

        • Parent NOT informative (Score:4, Interesting)

          by imsabbel (611519) on Friday January 11 2008, @05:38PM (#22006678)
          Sorry, but maybe you should come into this century. Your nice old f*I^2 is not true at all anymore. ESPECIALLY for laptop chips.
          And hasnt been since we reached 90nm.

          Check out Wikipedia and read up on leakage currents and the way to deal with them (and realize that your hypothetical laptop cell would use those 15W for leakage alone... tons of ugly logic transitors and little cache that can be efficiently power-managed)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by foniksonik (573572)
      Maybe it's better suited to be a co-processor.... not all technology is meant to be the main component, sometimes it's better to let it specialize, as long as the bus between the CPU and the Co-PU is fast enough all is good. GPUs are this way and have been a great success.
      • If these prove useful, maybe they can put the thing right on the die with the main CPU. Can't get much faster.

        I'm no hardware engineer, so I don't know the technical challenges involved. Otherwise, I guess they'd have to work out some licensing agreement so Intel/AMD can fab these. Doesn't seem impossible if there's a market for it.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by FunkyELF (609131)
        Do you have anything to back that up?
        The Cell in a PS3 a 3.2GHz PPC, enough to run an OS on without using the SPEs.
        Any use of SPEs by the OS would just make it faster.
        Not sure what use an OS would have for them though, they're really for the uerland multimedia apps or anything else using SIMD.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Doc Ruby (173196)
          I don't know where you're getting that. The PS3 I have 10 feet away from me certainly does run Linux. I have Ubuntu installed on it for almost a year, as do many others [psubuntu.org], and other distros, too (including the YDL that is Sony's official recommendation).

          FWIW, the PS2 also installed Linux for general purpose computing on any PS2, too, not just a closed Sony dev environment. I was a member of that community, too, but waited until no additional HW (ie. nonstandard hard drive and ethernet) were required. The PS3

  • Really kinda cool (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LWATCDR (28044) on Friday January 11 2008, @10:37AM (#21999562) Homepage Journal
    Seem like it would be really handy to put something like this on a video card. You could use it for physics modeling, effects, anything else the SPEs are good at.
    Since this is a lot slower than the PS3 I have to wonder when the first hand recognition based games and controls will be available on the PS3. The EyeToy should work just fine for those.
      • Are they any good? Have they managed to use them for controling the DVD player yet? Seems like it could be kind of neat if it worked well. I don't have a PS3 so I have little experience with it.
        So far I haven't seen anything that I think is really must have on the PS3. All the demos I have seen are just very pretty but very normal games.

      • But infringed the SCO copyright on "body part recognition games". The legal team distinctly remember the very challenging original release, where they had to distinguish "arse" and "elbow" graphics.

  • Dreaming (Score:5, Interesting)

    by explosivejared (1186049) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `deraj.nagah'> on Friday January 11 2008, @10:39AM (#21999586)
    As with all things cool, Spurs is not yet available to consumers, and may never actually come to market. But it's fun to dream.

    It's also fun to dream that vaporware may one day not be the staple feature of Slashdot. I would love to see the day where I don't have to be so cynical about new products I see on Slashdot because I trust in its availability. Like the man said... it's fun to dream.

  • Toshiba had four demos running... Demo 3... scans all your movie files, recognizes faces, and creates thumbnails of those faces. You can then click the thumbnails to watch scenes with those faces in, or compile them in a separate playlist.

    Just change those movies to security camera feeds and there you go!

    Possibly quite literally!

    • Whoa, you mean it could be used to find the facials in security camera feeds too? Hmm, damn, do you think it's too late to change career track to the guy watching those feeds?

  • Demo 3... (Score:5, Funny)

    by L4t3r4lu5 (1216702) on Friday January 11 2008, @10:40AM (#21999620)
    "... scans all your movie files, recognizes faces, and creates thumbnails of those faces. You can then click the thumbnails to watch scenes with those faces in, or compile them in a separate playlist." So Sony have created a chip and software combo which rips all the spooge scenes out of your pr0n? Classy.

  • Great Demo... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...too bad it only recognizes faces. Would be great for my pr0n collection.

  • Reminds us of ATARI Falcon, NeXTstations (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Saffaya (702234) on Friday January 11 2008, @10:49AM (#21999754)
    Those had a 56001 DSP along their motorola main CPU for extra mathematical oomph, and impressive realtime visual or sound effects.
    If this Cell inclusion could become a trend, it could lead to a lot of interesting applications.
    (especially from the free software world, demo-scene, etc ...)
    • Damn, beat me to it. I had exactly the same thought re the Falcon. Nice for audio processing if nothing else :-)
    • And the Mac Quadra AV series, with that 66 MHz DSP from TI.

    • Quadra 660AV/840AV (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SuperBanana (662181) on Friday January 11 2008, @11:35AM (#22000388)

      Those had a 56001 DSP along their motorola main CPU for extra mathematical oomph, and impressive realtime visual or sound effects.

      The Quadra 660AV and 840AV had an AT&T DSP in it that handled all of the sound and video functions. It could also do voice recognition of any menu item, button, or a universal command set within a decent amount of time. It also had a telephone interface box which let it mimic a fax machine or data modem (and I say mimic, because it was horribly unreliable at the latter; fax transmissions were short enough that your chances were better), or behave as an answering machine.

      There was also exactly ONE application that I remember for the DSP aside from what Apple used the DSP for: one could use the DSP to do fractals in a fraction of the time the 68040 processor could, though the DSP ran at about twice the clock speed (25mhz vs. 55mhz I believe.) In short: utterly useless, and it was discontinued after a year or two. It did have a clever feature or two, one of which was that it could load the ROM (for those of you who don't remember, all the system toolbox commands were in ROM, not on-disk) into RAM, which would suck several precious MB- but would dramatically and noticeably speed up the system. The functionality came via a third-party hack.

      The best "feature", however, was its crashes. Given this was an old System-7/8/9 machine and 68040 based, it suffered from the usual stability problems, only multiplied by about ten-fold because of all the shit that was needed to handle the funky DSP graphics/sound/etc. The best part: the main CPU and the DSP would get out of sync during these crashes, and would feed garbage to each other. Kind of like catting /dev/random to the input of a 10-foot-tall milling machine, you have no idea what you're going to get, but it'll be impressive to watch.

      Ask any 660AV/840AV owner. It was kind of like watching a dozen first-grader buggy logo scripts running, accompanied by the sound of a dozen Amigas crashing into a dozen Commodores whilest each was running a 'tracker' playing a corrupted MOD file, with pushy solos by a bored 6 year old Recorder player.

  • So it can take low res video, convert it to high res video, do facial recognition, and organize those recognized faces for easy playback... the potential for it's use in security and espionage systems is huge!

    It is both exciting, and slightly scary.

    -Rick
  • I'm totally going to buy one of these just to sort my porn collection

  • M$ should be happy . . . (Score:4, Funny)

    by thesuperbigfrog (715362) on Friday January 11 2008, @11:23AM (#22000242)
    Finally there's a laptop that can give you the Windows Vista Aero experience as Microsoft intended!

  • Toshiba and BS Bios (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sgt scrub (869860) <saintiumNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Friday January 11 2008, @11:45AM (#22000534) Homepage
    Strange that they disable the VMX extensions in their laptops and refuse to allow the owners to re-enable it but then add more functionality to the machine. I'd be happy if they would just let me take advantage of what I thought I was buying. It would also be nice if they would fix the ACPI incompatibilities with nVidia graphics so I don't have to rewrite asm files to get the gpu cooling fan to work properly. I'd go into the whole list of things that helped me to decide to never buy anything with the Toshiba name on it but there isn't enough space or time. This link, however, says it all.

    http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/phoenix-bios-only-works-with-vista.html [cyberciti.biz]
  • This article focuses on the effect of Cell's SPEs (DSPs), but Cell also has a PowerPC CPU and a RAMBUS memory bus. So unless Toshiba's removed those parts from this version of Cell, this laptop, with its Intel CPU, has two complete, separate, incompatible CPUs, memory buses and memory banks. That'll make this laptop big, expensive, and power hungry.

    Both Intel and AMD want to integrate more powerful DSPs onto the CPU in various ways, so unless Toshiba intends to eventually make an x86-compatible version of
  • What is the OS?

  • Great research! (Score:3, Informative)

    by aliquis (678370) <dospam@gmail.com> on Friday January 11 2008, @12:14PM (#22000982) Homepage
    Yeah, everyone knows 8*3 is 75% more than 4*1.5, just because the later one is 25% as much doesn't make the former one 75% more, and will never do...

    Also why would this be that expensive considering the PS3 got 4 times as much SPE power, the ppc core, good gfx chips, blu-ray and so on and still doesn't cost that much of a fortune compared to laptop prices?

    • You sonuvabitch! (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I bet you're the jackass editor who keeps putting clips of close ups of just faces in my porn. You better hope I, and a soon to be gigantic and bloodthirsty mob, don't find where you live! I knew you'd slip up one day, you bastard.
      • During the motion sensor demo with the Transformers movie it was Vista.
      • Cell is a PPC chip and Windows hasn't run on PPC in a while. But this laptop gets around that by using the Cell as a coprocessor. The main processor is an Intel-type.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Sketch (2817)
          The Xbox360 runs a version of Windows. The Xbox360 is PPC-based. Therefore, Windows runs on PPC. Maybe not a standard desktop version you could buy, but Microsoft could probably be persuaded to give a test version to a major vendor if they thought it would be a worthwhile project.

    • Toshiba CEO: I've got it, put in one of those Cell processor thingies. Get me Sony on the phone now! Sony: Hello? Oh yes we've got a giant bin in the back with all of the cell processors that didn't make the grade for our PS3. Oh you'd like to buy some? Excellent!
      Talk about ironic! Toshiba uses Sony techonology to improve on a laptop. Hmmmm, HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray anyone???

      • Re:nice advertising pitch (Score:5, Informative)

        by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Friday January 11 2008, @11:15AM (#22000106)
        Talk about ironic! Toshiba uses Sony techonology to improve on a laptop.

        It's not "Sony" technology. Sony, Toshiba, and IBM joined together several years ago to co-develop the Cell processor. Also, if I'm not mistaken, Toshiba is handling the manufacturing of a good number of the chips.

    • Re:nice advertising pitch (Score:5, Interesting)

      by DrXym (126579) on Friday January 11 2008, @11:00AM (#21999924)
      Toshiba make the cell processors for Sony. They probably do test the processors to see which have 7 or 8 working SPUs and send them off to Sony. The rest could be used for other tasks that require a general purpose chip with DSP-like functionality but require less SPUs.

      BTW it's the ultimate irony that Toshiba make the processor for the machine that was / is killing HD DVD. But I expect the Japanese electronics industry is full of incestuous, contradictory partnerships like this.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by antek9 (305362)
        It's not incestuous at all, it's called a win/win situation. Although everyone (except IBM) also keeps losing a little bit at the same time. BTW, the summary is incorrect in that it completely forgets about/ignores the Cell chip also powering IBM's Blade servers. Not a small factor if you want to determine the chip's relative failure or success.
    • but it does seem like it's indicating that IBM is still having yield problems with the Cell

      1) Something tells me it's far more likely that Toshiba is trying to find something to do with their extra parts. They manufacture it, too, since Sony sold them the fab. [engadget.com] IBM is not a sole-source supplier for Sony.

      2) Some yield loss, especially with a chip the size of Cell, is expected. No chip will ever yield 100% (it's not worth the engineering effort to get there). So to presume that the sale of a product li

    • Considering that it's a different chip [wikipedia.org], and manufactured by Toshiba, I'd guess that IBM's yields don't have much to do with it.

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