All the rumors last week were about a change in hands of the Sony Cell chip fabrication plants in Japan thought to be in the process of being sold to Toshiba. This will of course be fuelled by some of the ideas that the TV giant showed the CEATEC electronics show in Japan last week.
Toshiba used a slightly truncated version of the chip to process images of people in a room with the aim of using image movements as controls for a laptop, in turn used to control a DVD player from a range of 10 feet and were reported by the Associated Press among others.
The software running was called the ”SpursEngine” processor which runs on the Cell chip, offloading image recognition requests from the PC processor. Toshiba helped Sony improve on and build the Cell design which was originally developed by IBM. So far its only bulk application is as the driving force behind the PlayStation 3, but it is a natural as a plug in processor for a PC, given its supercomputer class processing power.
The software worked from about 10 feet away, presumably through an image picked up by a CCD. Two years ago Toshiba showed the Cell chip resolving signals to 48 different TV sets, but has yet to bring any product to market using the chip. The Cell has been largely associated with HDTV sets and encoders but few products have yet emerged apart from an IBM marketed workstation and blade processor and the fact that IBM is building a supercomputer with the chips.
Toshiba also showed an application called Facemation based on a three-dimensional face recognition technology, but running on a laptop, whereby a 2D headshot photo was used to build a 3D head, which could be viewed from any direction. Again the PC processor offloads work to the Cell. The only application that anyone has mentioned is that you could see what you’d look like with a new hairstyle, but that would hardly justify real time, supercomputer class, 3D graphics.
The Cell chip that Toshiba was working with had just 4 slave processors, whereas the PS3 chip is closer to the full Cell architecture with one Power core and 8 slaves, all working in parallel.
It may take years for the SDKs associated with the Cell chip to generate enough applications to make the Cell a commercial success, however it is so advanced in terms of chip architecture that it probably has several years lead for this type of processor intensive application.