Cell Broadband Engine is the heart of Sony’s video game console PlayStation 3 and sports an impressive parallel power. We’ve seen proof of this with the new and special PS3 folding@home client. The company Mercury Computer Systems has now presented yet another proof of the power of Cell as it has announced a new HD video encoding engine that is based on the Cell Broadband Engine. According to Mercury, the new engine will offer up to 10 times the encoding performance when compared to current systems when encoding HD material with the AVC/H.264 formats. Mercury is currently working with NTT Advanced Technology Corporation and tuning the software for the system which they hope to be present as a commercial encoding platform at the end of 2007.
