I had heard plenty about how powerful the Cell processor is, but all those gigaflops and whatnot didn’t mean a whole lot to me. Finally, I’m starting to get a clearer picture of what it can actually do. In a demonstration at the “COOL Chips VIII” show held by Toshiba in Yokohama last week, a Cell processor setup decoded 48 SDTV resolution MPEG-2 video streams simultaneously. The videos were then thumbnailed, tiled, and displayed at a resolution of 1920 x 1080. There’s more potential, though — of the eight “SPE” signal processors inside the Cell chip, six were used for video decoding, one for video output, and one was left idle. For those that may have missed it, Sony plans on putting a Cell processor inside each and every Playstation 3.
Toshiba demonstrates 48-stream decode using Cell processor [TechOn]
