Toshiba has announced that it has started shipping samples of its SpursEngine SE1000. It’s derived from the Cell Broadband Engine and sports four Synergistic Processing Element (SPE) cores. SpursEngine SE1000 is a high-performance stream processor which acts like a co-processor and brings full hardware codec support for MPEG-2 and H.264 streams. SpursEngine SE1000 sports an impressive processing performance of 48GFlops (12GFlops/SPE). It operates at 1.5GHz, with a 10-20W TDP and has 128MB XDR RAM, resulting in a bandwidth of 12.8GB/s.
“We are very pleased to have started sample shipping of SpursEngine” said Yoshio Masubuchi, Director of Toshiba’s System LSI Division, Advanced SoC Development Center. “The design of this powerful co-processor is dedicated to bringing the advanced capabilities of the Cell/B.E.™ to consumer electronics, particularly video processing in digital consumer products. We are sure that SpursEngine will accelerate the market for full-HD applications.”
The reference card comes with references, samples, SDK (Software Development Kit) with SPE compiler, SPE debugger, performance monitor and essential APIs. The card itself will slide right into an empty PCIe 1x slot.
