Toshiba Includes Dedicated Multimedia Chip in Upcoming Qosmio G55

Toshiba’s upcoming Qosmio G55 notebook looks to employ a Quad-Core processor, but it might not be what you think. It’s not from AMD, nor Intel, but rather the result of a collaboration between IBM, Sony and Toshiba. Based on the Cell processor, used in blade servers, this Quad-Core chip operating at 1.5GHz (256KB cache per core) will be used to enhance your multimedia experience.

I’ve emailed Toshiba to get specifics on exactly why this chip will help improve multimedia tasks, but from what I understand, it would be similar to Intel taking their SSE4 instruction set and putting it on a dedicated processor. Whether or not this means you will need specially-equipped software to take advantage of the enhancements, I’m unsure, but hope to have an answer soon.

Still, this idea is interesting, and no doubt intriguing for hardcore multimedia buffs. It seems a little odd to chuck this in a notebook, but the Qosmio G55 is a desktop replacement, so using it as the initial platform to test the waters isn’t a bad idea. Well, that, and not to mention that Toshiba doesn’t deal with desktop systems. I’m still trying to surmise the usefulness of the chip though, because once mobile Quad-Cores hit the mainstream, it might have less of an appeal. But, faster is faster, so it might always have a place somewhere. Adding four extra dedicated cores can’t be a bad thing, right?

The Japanese company says that the processor achieves what many high-end graphics processing units (GPUs) from the likes of Nvidia and AMD now feature: transcoding acceleration. Transcoding, or converting–movies, for example–from one format to another, can be extremely time consuming, sometimes taking hours.

Source: C|Net News