Despite the air being sucked out of the room by the HD-DVD
presentation that kicked-off today's Toshiba’s CES press conference (you’ll recall
Warner just dumped Tosh’s HD DVD format for Blu-ray), there was one non-HD-DVD
nugget of information that really caught my attention.
Several months ago I reviewed Sony’s Playstation 3, for which I did lots of
research on the new Cell Broadband Engine, the CPU that drives the PS3. This
chip was developed in partnership between Sony, IBM and (you guessed it)
Toshiba.
We know what Sony is doing with their piece of the Cell pie. IBM,
meanwhile, plans to use the Cell as the basis of its future supercomputers. So
that just left Toshiba. What did they want with a processor capable of 1
trillion calculations per second?
That other shoe has finally dropped, and today they announced that they expect
to ship displays this fall that will feature the Cell processing engine. While
detailed information wasn't available, it appears these displays will use the
Cell to improve the quality of standard definition (SD) video as well as
display multiple high-def images on screen at once. If nothing else, they will
be the smartest HDTVs on the market!
—John Sciacca
