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Portables Hardware

Toshiba Uses Cell Chip In Consumer Laptop 179

Posted by kdawson from the thinking-outside-the-cell dept.
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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Toshiba Uses Cell Chip In Consumer Laptop More

Toshiba Uses Cell Chip In Consumer Laptop

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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...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by F-3582 ( 996772 )
      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 ;-)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sconeu ( 64226 )
          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 @12:29PM (#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.
            • Developers at Digital, on alpha machines, did the leg work on NT so it would work on 32 and 64 systems. I guess after IBM stopped giving them code, via OS/2, they had to find someone to do the work for them.
              • Not only did developers at digital do the leg work, Alpha machines that were to run windows NT had to have special co processor to convert the NT code into Alpha instructions.

                this I know for a fact as I have held in my hands an Alpha Motherbaord and have seen the clearly labeled chip for MSFT NT compatibility.

                I took the unit apart for fun. the 256MB ram cards were bigger than the laptop I am writing this on.

                • 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.

            • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

              by chasd ( 1195929 )

              Actually for a long time Microsoft wrote NT on the MIPS and ported to Intel.

              The first time I saw Windows NT run it was on a MIPS computer.

              Microsoft was actually pretty serious about NT on the Alpha, MIPS, and PPC for a long while.

              The way I remember it, IBM was in charge of the PPC version, and they had a very difficult time getting it out the door. There were rumors that some at IBM wanted PPC OS/2 to ship before PPC Windows NT, and that was the stumbling block.

              Microsoft finally just gave up since

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by ChunderDownunder ( 709234 )
        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:2)

        by rbanffy ( 584143 )
        "You can't just compile an entire software catalog to PPC within a week"

        You can recompile an entire software catalog for PPC. It's done routinely by the folks at almost all major Linux distros.

        I would love a 100% windows-proof notebook.

    • 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: (Score:2)

        by neomunk ( 913773 )
        I may be reading the PWRficient material wrong (I didn't look too hard honestly) but I think you're comparing apples to Volkswagons here.

        The WHOLE POINT of the cell isn't the PPC goodness, it's the vector lovins inside that make multimedia apps scream. Vector processors make certain floating point calculations (like anything trying to model real life: videos, pictures, sounds and so forth) unbelievably fast. Another regular ole' PPC is just a competing product, not a NEW CLASS of product, meant for a slig
      • This isn't the Cell that ships in a PS3. It's a derived design with four SPEs and hardware MPEG encode/decode. The prototype draws 10-20W @ 1.5GHz and production versions would doubtless be more efficient than that.

        The PWRficient isn't comparible. That's a general purpose processor. This is a co-processor that doesn't even implement a PPC instruction set.

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

        by default luser ( 529332 ) on Friday January 11, 2008 @04:18PM (#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 @06:38PM (#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:2)

          by cgenman ( 325138 )
          The bigger your main die, the bigger % of chips need to be thrown out at the fab plant due to impurities in the manufacturing process. That lowers yield exponentially, and drives up price. At some point you have to split things off into separate chips or else your manufacturing output effectively falls to zero.

    • The PS3 has a Cell with a (2-thread, 3.2GHz) PPC core and 7 (not just 3-4) SPUs, and runs Linux. It's not a laptop, and its Cell is different (includes PPC) than the SpursEngine, but it's a good reference for comparison to this x86/Cell hybrid.

      The main benefit that you can see from this comparison is that the x86/Cell hybrid can run Windows, so it will sell more (and to more developers). Which means more Cell SW than the niche (and also crippled by Sony's Hypervisor and hardwired small RAM) PS3. A laptop wo
      • I think you just gave me a chubber! :-D

        Seriously though, what you describe is EXACTLY what I've been hoping to see happen since I first heard about the Cell. I'm especially excited about the multi-Cell features (which you correctly point out as being a major focus of the architectural design) now that our more general multi-core architectures have advanced enough to let the combination of Cell/x86 really shine. Now all we need to do is get a GPU/physics-in-hardware combination (possibly Cell powered itsel
        • Another big benefit to this Toshiba laptop would be mass-market chipset support for anything with a Cell in it. The PS3 is not only hobbled by RAM and Hypervisor, it's also a niche platform. As is the Cell blade platform that IBM and others (though they seem to have disappeared) have announced. Just seeing a "regular PC" with a programmable Cell (or even just a bank of programmable SPUs like the SpurEngine) would push us over the threshold towards a larger general community of Cell/SPU programmers, and an i

  • Really kinda cool (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Friday January 11, 2008 @11:37AM (#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.
    • Seem like it would be really handy to put something like this on a video card.

      Yeah, I bet it would be nearly as good as current video cards. You might want to ask yourself why the PS3 has that Nvidia chip in it.
    • You know the saying 'if you think of something it has probably already been done'

      http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/06/19/can_ageia/ [tomshardware.com]

  • Dreaming (Score:5, Interesting)

    by explosivejared ( 1186049 ) <hagan@jared.gmail@com> on Friday January 11, 2008 @11:39AM (#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.

  • NSA will find this usefull. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AltGrendel ( 175092 ) <(su.0tixe) (ta) (todhsals-ga)> on Friday January 11, 2008 @11:40AM (#21999610) Homepage

    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 @11:40AM (#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.
    • It'll be Japanese market only, but mandatory for real-time censoring of porn with unpixelated genitalia.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by SirLoadALot ( 991302 )
      The summary only mentions Demo 3. Here are the others:

      Demo 1 is the lonely Demo of all.

      Demo 2 is a brute force MD5 cracker, so Toshiba can screw up SquirrelMail for reals next time.

      Demo 4 works the same as Demo 3, but replace "face" with "nipple".

      Demo 5 scans your music collection for Paris Hilton and, if found, e-mails your entire address book to let them know how bad you suck.

      We don't talk about Demo 6.

      Demo 7 burns with the rage of a thousand suns.

      Demo 8 performs MPEG2 compression in both little and big

  • Great Demo... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...too bad it only recognizes faces. Would be great for my pr0n collection.
    • So you're saying you can recognize pornstars by their genitals, but not by their faces? Truly, you are the master of pron-sadness.

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

    by Saffaya ( 702234 ) on Friday January 11, 2008 @11:49AM (#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 :-)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nimey ( 114278 )
      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 @12:35PM (#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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by raddan ( 519638 )
        Wow. As a teenager, I drooled over those machines, and my all-consuming goal was to save enough paper route money to buy one. I ended up opting for the much more affordable LCIII. I had had a taste of the 68040 at my father's work-- one of the programmers had a Quadra 950-- and I always wanted one. I ended up getting a Quadra 605 some time later on a trade-in deal that a local computer shop was doing, and that was a great machine, but I never forgot how badass those AV machines seemed. After your story

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Alsee ( 515537 )
      If this Cell inclusion could become a trend, it could lead to a lot of interesting applications.

      Yeah. Interesting applications indeed.

      "Cell Broadband Engine Support for Privacy Security and Digital Rights Management" [google.com]

      Note that that is an official IBM published technical paper on the Cell and that that is IBM's own title.

      And even with that link, someone ALWAYS manages to come along and call it a tinfoil hat fantasia when I state that the Cell CPU has explicitly designed with DRM support in the hardware. Every
  • 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 @12:23PM (#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 ) <saintium@NOSpAM.yahoo.com> on Friday January 11, 2008 @12:45PM (#22000534)
    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

    • 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.

      How is this any different from the laptops with high-end graphics chips? Also, it is worth noting that this chip tops out at about 20W, so it probably uses much less power than the intel chip for things like video encoding and decoding.

    • Rather than speculating, you could read the press release [toshiba.co.jp]. This isn't "The Cell"; it's the SpursEngine. Completely different design. Sits on a standard PCI-E bus. Draws 10-20W in prototype.

  • OS? (Score:2)

    by Kludge ( 13653 )
    What is the OS?
  • Um... could I skip a certain folder. I mean you're going to find faces, but I can't really say that the expressions are going to be good thumbnails. Um... let me just move those files somewhere on an external drive and disconnect it... just to be sure.

  • Photos from CES (Score:2, Informative)

    by barl0w2 ( 1096357 )
    I took pics of a lot of cool stuff at CES here: http://flickr.com/photos/barl0w/ [flickr.com] There are some pretty cool things there this year, but I think web-cam hand gesture recognition is overrated.

  • Great research! (Score:3, Informative)

    by aliquis ( 678370 ) on Friday January 11, 2008 @01:14PM (#22000982)
    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?
    • The article also seems to ignore that the SpursEngine includes decidated MPEG-2/4 decoding and encoding, which the PS3 lacks. I'm not sure but I think that could make a wee bit of difference for video stream processing. :)

    • 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[...]

      You're assuming that number of processing cores and clock speed are the only factors involved in the performance difference, and that performance scales linearly as the product of the two numbers. Neither assumption is correct. A dual-core Intel processor is not automa

    • I think you also have to factor in the fact that the PS3 is subsidized by future game sales, i.e. they can sell it cheap and make their profit on the games you subsequently will buy for the PS3.
  • That news coverage was idiotic, full of wrong facts, and not worth watching for the commentary. SD TV is not VGA (at least 800x600 is required), the PS3 Cell has 7 working SPUs, not 8, and one more is dedicated to onchip management (unavailable).

    The commenter didn't bother to ask how the 1080p simulation compared to actual 1080p. Or anything else, like why a Cell is necessary for the gesture recognition. And their scepticism over a relatively inexpensive Cell laptop shows they're truly idiotic, because prob
  • Even the Wikipedia SpursEngine article [wikipedia.org] has much better info than that idiotic news coverage.

    Most interesting is the claim that Linux drivers will be available for the SpursEngine. If the code that the Cell's SPUs run to process video is available, it could be ported to the PS3 Linux [psubuntu.com] that has 7 (not 3-4) SPUs available, right onchip with a huge bus to the PPC CPU.
  • scans all your movie files, recognizes faces, and creates thumbnails of those faces

    And by faces, they mean boobies.
  • "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."" ...my oh my, this will make those hundreds of gigs of porn so much easier to watch.
  • I'm wondering about the statement:

    So far the only uses for Cell chips have been research stuff and the PS3.

    May one suppose by "research stuff" they are referring to the end-uses of the chip? One could interpret the statement as meaning the chip itself has only (outside of the PS3) been used as the subject of research. That would seem to contradict the server offerings from Mercury Systems.

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