Those good old times when you only had one CPU and one GPU inside your computer are gone, and they won't return anytime soon, as long as you're into gaming. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see even mobile phones powered by multi-core processors in the not-so-distant future, but that's not my subject today, because I just found out about a really mind-blowing technology - quad-core video processing units!


Toshiba Corp., involved in various fields of electronics design and manufacturing, announced that interested parties will soon receive its SpursEngine processors, able to work with no less than 4 full-HD videos at a time, thanks to their four stream processors!

Yoshio Masubuchi, director of Toshiba’s system LSI division, said "We are very pleased to have started sample shipping of SpursEngine. 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."

While home users won't probably find any use for this new technological wonder yet, professionals will surely enjoy the performance offered by the four Cell RISC core SPEs with full hardware decoding and encoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 video. The SpursEngine prototype operates at 1.5GHz, with a power consumption between 10W and 20W, while the SpursEngine SE1000 reference board can work with PCI Express 1.1 x1 and x4 slots, has 128MB of XDR memory clocked at 1.6GHz, and its SpursEngine processors have a speed currently unknown.

Anyway, it seems Toshiba has big plans with this technology, and in the future we may see it in a lot of devices, if everything works well. According to sources from inside the company, they "are partnering with Corel Corp. whose headquarters are in Canada; and Taiwan based CyberLink Corp. and Leadtek Research Inc. These companies produce popular video and image processing software and hardware such as graphic board, and will together supply to set manufactures. By working together with these companies and creating a new value chain, many end user can enjoy comfortable digital life by using our board and software bundled with SpursEngine."