Maybe the Cell will get into our Macs through the back door |
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Almost simultaneously with Toshiba's abandonment of the HD-DVD format, it was learned that Sony had agreed to sell their manufacturing equipment to them to produce the Cell processors and to give them 60% share of a joint venture based on this processor.
Some see this as a compensation or an incentive for Toshiba to throw in the towel quickly. Toshiba had not joined the Blu-ray camp and had announced that they wanted to focus on the online distribution of HD media.
They intend to propose accelerator cards using the Cell processor. They will be able to decode and encode the MPEG-2 and H.264 on the fly and will be in the form of PCI-Express cards.
In order to reduce the consumption of this processor, Toshiba will run them at 1.5 GHz (versus 3.2 GHz in the PS3), a frequency sufficient for this use, allowing the power drawn to remain between 10 and 20W.
Thus, with drivers developed for Mac, one could also have access to this kind of product, and rediscover a little of the knowledge to make IBM run in our Macs.
[translation by crispin]
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