Sony is selling the biggest portion of the manufactured Cell processors through its video game console PlayStation 3. The console isn’t just fast to render video games in glorious 3D graphics but is also one of the most appreciated Blu-ray and media players on the market. The console has the Cell processor to thank for this as the architecture is just perfect for assisting during video playback, video encoding and editing.
Toshiba has designed a video circuit called SpursEngine based on the Cell processor. Using four SPE cores, SpursEngine will be a welcomed addition to less powerful computers that could use a boost when playing High Definition video or editing. We have been following the development of Leadtek’s Winfast PxVC1100 designed for this very purpose.
Leadtek Winfast PxVC1100 with SpursEngine
Japanese software developer Pegasys has launched a new plugin for TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress that enables encoding and decoding support for Toshiba’s SpursEngine. The results are quite astonishing where you can gain up to 588% when converting between video formats. Together with a CUDA-compatible NVIDIA graphics card.
Click to enlarge
