Toshiba's SpursEngine chip dominates in transcoding demonstration

by Darren Murph, posted Jun 9th 2008 at 9:19AM

Toshiba has let us know just how incredible its SpursEngine SE1000 chip really is, but all that talk has never amounted to much -- until now. Packed away in a dusty corner of Computex 2008 was Corel's demonstration booth, which just so happened to have a few rigs set up with a Cell-optimized version of its DVD MovieFactory application. One station utilized the SE1000, while the other relied solely on a 3GHz Intel Core 2 Quad CPU to transcode 1080p H.264 video to 480p. According to onlookers, the SpursEngine-based machine completed the task nearly twice as fast as the hamstrung opponent, proving that maybe Toshiba does have something worth waiting for on that PCI-Express card. Too bad there's still no mention of a price.