Cell showdown

Cell are for those of you have lived in the shadows the latest six months the base arcitecture in Sony’s coming video game console PlayStation 3. The processor has been talked about a lot, much because of its “new” design with several processing units integrated into the same core and the potential is suppose to be huge. So far we haven’t seen any tests of Cell capacity, but now one of the developers, Toshiba, has given us a little preview of the capacity of Cell.

 

It has namely displayed a movie demonstrating a Cell-processor decoding 48 MPEG2-streams in SDTV-format.

“In the film, 48 MPEG-2 streams stored on a HDD were read, decoded and projected to a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution display divided into 8 x 6 cells, each of which showed a different video fitted to the cell size. The company expects the technology to be used to display moving thumbnails in a video list. Of the eight synergistic processor elements (SPE) featured by the Cell, six are used for decoding 48 MPEG-2 streams and one is used for scaling the screen. The remaining SPE can be used for a completely different processing.”

It’s hard to compare this to other processors but we can clearly confirm a good capacity for multimedia, which is good since one its intentional uses was TVs and similar.

Source: Tech-On!