Toshiba SE1000: Cell-based Accelerating Cards Are Back

During the Computex 2008, Corel was demonstrating an accelerator board based on the Cell BE processor, known as Toshiba’s SpursEngine 1000 (SE1000). The 65 nm Cell BE processor clocked at 1.5 GHz (compared to the 3.2 GHz in the Playstation 3) and featuring 4 active SPE units (compared to 8 for the PS3) and 128 MB XDR DRAM memory (compared to 256 MB for the PS3) is sitting on a PCI 1x card. Corel was demonstrating the power of such video accelerating card in transcoding 1080p H.264 video to a smaller resolution, and comparing the performance level with a 3 GHz Intel Core 2 Quad CPU-based system.
With such task-specific card, the SE1000 completed the work about twice faster than the Quad Core hardware, demonstrating that specialized functions can be completed much faster while consuming less power than using one of the best desktop CPU available on the market. It reminds us when coprocessors were associated with processor couple of years ago to boost specific tasks. Are we going back to a more task-oriented architecture? It will for sure be interesting to know the price of such card, as most of the PCI slots in our Mac Pro are not being used.