Apparently the first laptop with a Cell (well, Spurs Engine) on board:

http://www.hothardware.com/News/Toshiba ... ed_Laptop/
http://explore.toshiba.com/laptops/qosmio/G50/G55-Q802


Looks like that could be a lot of fun :-)


Johan.

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Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

While Toshiba and IBM are very different companies, when we read this post from Johan, we could not help to think about IBM's announcement yesterday:

IBM Invests $1 Billion To Expand Chip Plant

We are told it will take more than that to get to the next generation of processor cores, but it is interesting to see IBM investing in microelectronics as they actually don't make much money selling them if at all. Perhaps, IBM executives have finally begun to understand that it will be remarkable end user devices that will serve both as port and terminal to of all future 'internauts' whether they understand they are using the internet or not...;-)

Pure speculation on our part, but at least the new Freescale CEO understands this.

R&B :-)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

from that link it says it will have Intel Core 2 Duo Processor P7350 (2 GHz), what happened to the cell ?

It's not a "Cell" laptop, it's an Intel laptop (Core 2 duo) with a SPU-only Cell-stripped chip on the side to do heavy calculations that the Core 2 duo can't do on its own. It has nothing to do with PowerPC.

Yeah, bad choice of words on my part - it was late :-)

Anyway, it's still nice to see the Spurs Engine pop up in more places.



Johan.

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Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

The question is, will anyone actually use this extra chip?

oh yeah, a 10 lb laptop with x86 and a partial cell. dumb. just make a nice efficent powerpc laptop.

my brother had a huge laptop, it is pointless, its heavy, and he gets 30 min on the battery (hot in efficient cpu and graphics). its more like a folding desktop computer.

i would take my ibook over that, yeah its slower, but lighter, more power efficient, i still get 5 hours on it, over 3 years old.

matt

It really depends on what you want from the laptop. There are laptops which are exactly intended to be a desktop replacement. They are not lightweight and don't offer long battery life, but that's because they're intended to be plugged in and deliver the best performance possible.


Johan.

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Johan Dams, Genesi USA Inc.
Director, Software Engineering

Yep, I have a blog... PurpleAlienPlanet

i think thats why my brother got what he got. i dont think he is satisfied. sure its got a lot of processing power, but doesnt work well as a desktop or a laptop.

back on topic, i think if they are going to make a cell laptop, it should be a cell, none of this x86 garbage. and it should be efficient, something i can carry around and show off.

matt

well, the Cell as a cpu is not that efficient for use in a laptop in the first place, as it consumes ~50-80Wt, YMMV. The SpursEngine chip is ~20-25Wt though, which again is almost 2x as much as a G4/8610. I guess it could be used as a side chip to a 8610, as it could act as a gfx chip replacement, it could do the 3D stuff and act as a generic coprocessor -for funky stuff, like encoding/decoding, rendering, face recognition -like used in the Cosmio laptops.

But all that would require lots of engineering effort both in software and in hardware to make right.

Actually it's been marketed at about 15W at 1.5GHz, which is about the same as the MPC8610.

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Matt Sealey