Toshiba sticks SpursEngine in laptops

The notebook maker has said that it will bung its SpursEngine multimedia processor into portable computers to enhance graphics and videos as well as various other applications.

Last week the company outlined its growth strategy for the coming year, noting that the SpursEngine had a significant part to play. By this, Toshiba meant that it planned to shove the SpursEngine into all its AV Qosmio (that name rings a bell... almost - sub ed) notebooks, which the company reckons will up the picture quality to High Definition (HD) standards, due to the cell-derivative processor.

The cell microprocessor, which was developed by by IBM, Toshiba and Sony back in 2001, has a hardware codec for HD encoding and decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 streams and four slave cores optimised for media streaming. The SpursEngine which integrates four high-performance RISC core SPEs, uses XDR DRAM memory, clocks at 1.6GHz, and only uses 10-20 watts. The SpursEngine (SE1000) reference board is apparently also compliant with PCI Express 1.1 x1 and x4 slots.

In computers the SpursEngine purportedly comes in quite handy when it comes to anything to do with processing multiple data streams including processing videos, performing physics computations and messing around with graphics.

Companies like Corel and Cyberlink have already said that their software supports the chip, and Toshiba reckons that the notebooks sporting them should be available already.