Toshiba has just changed the way TVs are made by finally announcing a device which uses the power of the revolutionary Cell chip, the component developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba to drive the Sony PS3 gaming console.
Last year the manufacturing plant that Sony set up to build the chip changed hands and went to Toshiba. The Cell chips uses MIMD (multiple Instructions operating on Multiple Data) a form of parallelism, and has 8 slave chips and a master, doling out work for them over a superfast internal bus. It’s a monster, a supercomputer in a tiny box. The new TV set is called the Toshiba Cell Regza 55X1 and it is based on a proprietary Toshiba LED display system (think a bit like backlit OLED), has a 55 inch screen, and will be available in the Japanese market from the beginning of December. When we will get it in the US or Europe is anyone’s guess, but we reckon it won’t be more than 6 to 9 months.
In some applications, such as video rendering and re-calculating video, the Cell chip performs at 100 times the speed of an advanced Intel Pentium and Toshiba showed it at the COOL Chips VIII event in Yokohama in 2005 simultaneously decoding 48 streams of standard definition television, resizing them down to thumbnails and putting them on a single High Definition screen. Back then the MPEG2 formatted streams used up a full 1920 x 1080 pixels of a high definition TV, and this actual application was expected to be used to offer live program thumbnails of TV programs, as an alternative to channel hopping.
A full Cell chip consists of 8 SPEs (not slaves but they call them Synergistic Processing Elements) each crunching up to 4 x 32-bit words simultaneously in a highly parallel architecture, built around 128-bit operations. All of this is controlled by one 64-bit conventional Power core, which dishes out the work to the other processing elements
Sony was due to launch a TV using the power of the Cell chip back in 2006, and yet this never materialized. If we look at the way Toshiba has used the chip to improve screen performance, we get a glimpse of the power of the chip. Almost all of the functions rest on decoding the codec image and then making calculations about what details were supposed to be present on the screen and improving them.
It offers something called Super Resolution, which works by recalculating and reconstructing the edge of a picture with more detail. It samples patterns around the edge of images and works out which ones are similar, but have more detail, and then copies pixels from these more defined areas to other parts of the edge. The result is more precise detail and more realistic high definition images, the company says.
Also Super Resolution does much the same with colour variation. Each pixel uses a different amount of data to vary colour, pixel to pixel. In normal digital TV, the processor cannot keep up with the rate at which data arrives from the antenna or video source, so video bits are typically made with colour information compressed to one-fourth that of brightness. The Cell chip is so fast that it can use special algorithms to re-calculate what the colour information should have been had more data been present.
Toshiba is saying that this will massively improve images that are sent from the Internet. Toshiba also says that the LED refreshes 240 times a second (240Hz), while existing TVs are often 30 Hz, with some at 60 Hz and recently some Japanese sets have come out at 120 Hz.
In the LED backlit system, instead of treating all the TV screen the same, it breaks it into 512 distinct areas, and separately calculates each with individually controlled lighting. The TV set has best of breed dynamic contrast ratio of around 5,000,000:1.
Toshiba says that the Cell is around 143 times faster than its current top of the line Regza TV, in terms of processing power.
The new Cell Regza comes with a 3-terabyte hard disk, 2 TB of which are dedicated to its “time-shift machine,” which can simultaneously record up to approximately 26 hours of programming for up to eight channels of digital terrestrial broadcasts. So that’s more than a day for 8 channels at a time (that’s how many terrestrial channels there are in Japan) which is why the TV comes with 8 tuners.
With the ability to store a massive amount of recorded programs, a fast, easy search function is essential. Toshiba delivers with “roaming navigation.” This allows viewers to find and display information on recorded, current and future programs simply by inserting an identifier -the title, person’s name, genre or related keywords.
The device has an advanced search supported by the Cell, and it shows search results with live video thumbnails of the programs most likely to also be relevant. It can also show thumbnails of 40 time-divided thumbnails within a recorded program, making it very easy to select and go to a particular scene.
Toshiba says it will come with high image quality YouTube, a browser supporting full HD, based on Opera and will be DLNA certified.
No prices as yet, but this is so far ahead of the field, it is certainly to be the top of the range in any shop.