New Cell-powered laptops from Toshiba

The new (and still ugly) Qosmio G50 and Qosmio F40 which will go on sale in July in Japan, will make use of the SpursEngine SE1000, a co-processor made of 4 Cell SPEs and no PPE.

The SPEs will be controlled by the off-die Intel Core 2 processor. Compare this with the PS3's Cell processor which has 8 SPEs and a PPE on-die to control them. This ought to be worth a performance hit in the SpursEngine. The bottleneck will be CPU-to-SpursEngine communication.

Another difference is that the SPEs in the Cell run at 3.2 GHz peaking at 25.6 GFLOPs per SPE while in the SpursEngine they run at 1.5GHz peaking at 12 GFLOPs per SPE.

The OS will run on the Intel Core 2 processor, and the SpursEngine will handle tasks such as HD processing. Toshiba claims the SpursEngine will be capable of upscaling SD content to HD.

Additional details about the laptops:
The Qosmio G50 is a multimedia laptop and has an 18.4-inch high-definition screen, 500G bytes of hard-disk space, NVidia GeForce 9600M graphics processor, dual digital TV tuners and wireless LAN including 802.11n. It weighs 4.9 kilograms and measures 45 centimeters by 31cms by 4.8cms. Battery life is about 4 hours.

The Qosmio G50 will be cost from ¥290,000 (US$2,700) and the F50, which has a 15-inch screen and 250G byte hard-disk drive, from ¥250,000. Toshiba plans to put the machines on sale overseas but has yet to announce launch details.


So what does this mean to you?
Another ugly Toshiba laptop, with too little too late technology. I wonder how the battery life will be on this thing? Maybe all of this is a futile attempt from Toshiba to make use of its Cell investment..

If you are clueless to terms like PPE and SPE, check this Wikipedia article.