Toshiba SpursEngine SE1000 is Cell on a Diet

Yesterday, we told you about the fact that Toshiba was going to use a “Cell” processor to process H.264 HD video streams. Just as we suspected, it is a scale-down version of the Cell design that is used in the PS3. It has only half of the co-processors (4 vs and runs at half the frequency (1.5Ghz instead of 3.2Ghz).

Still, that should be plenty to process HD video and now it makes financial sense (versus using a full-blown Cell). The real coolness comes from the fact that, unlike most video processors, it is fully programmable and therefore, it should be able to adapt to future algorithms and compression schemes.