Toshiba Cell TV – video processing using a cousin of the PS3 CPU

Posted on Sep 30, 08 02:11 AM PDT

[CEATEC 2008] Toshiba was demonstrating its Cell TV, a television that has a Cell processor in it, the same architecture than the one used for Sony’s PlayStation 3 (but with fewer processing cores). The Processor can be used for many things, like running software (user-interface etc…), but what was demonstrated here was video-filtering quality. To be honest, the demo was not very convincing. I’m sure that there was a difference but most people were looking at it wondering what they should look for – not good for a demo. The second point of having a Cell processor (as opposed to a non-programmable chip) is that Toshiba will be able to easily improve the image-quality via a new algorithm, without requiring a hardware update. Now, if Toshiba can build the (Cell) processor for a low price, it might pay-off in the future, because having a fully programmable chip allow a faster time-to-market, overall reactivity towards the competition and most importantly, it avoids building a new custom chip to accomodate new filtering techniques.

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