Toshiba Launches First Cell-based Laptop 172
MojoKid writes "On Tuesday, Toshiba launched the
Qosmio G55-802, the first laptop available with the Cell CPU. Yes, think PS3 technology, developed jointly by Toshiba, Sony, and IBM. However, in particular, the Cell CPU is not about gaming, but about the multimedia experience. Taking the load away from the Intel CPU, the Cell processor performs gesture control, face navigation, transcoding and upscaling to HD. Interestingly (and necessary, with 4 GB of RAM), the system comes with 64-bit Vista installed by default, but 32-bit Vista ships as an option as well." However, semi-relatedly, if you'd prefer your Cells run open-source code, 1i1' blu3 writes "IBM's put up an open source project downloads page for the Cell processor — APIs, toolkits, IDEs, libraries, algorithms, etc. Most of the stuff on it right now is from SourceForge, but they are asking for user contributions to add to it." (Terra Soft's also been providing a Cell-compatible Linux distro for a while now, and according to Wikipedia the kernel's supported it since version 2.6.16.)
Not, in fact, the first Cell laptop (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/10/the-ps3-laptop-from-ben-heck-to-engadget-with-love/ [engadget.com]
Re:Not cell-based, cell-assisted (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not cell-based, cell-assisted (Score:3, Informative)
Good price too (Score:3, Informative)
PS3 + linux = shit (Score:2, Informative)
The RSX is still locked away and there is no decent video driver. It's like using an old Pentium machine.
Re:The cell was NOT developed for the PS3 (Score:1, Informative)
Wrong. Completely wrong.
Cell was the brainchild of Sony's hardware genius Kutagari and IBM's Hofstee - equally a genius but in a different way.
Re:Not cell-based, cell-assisted (Score:3, Informative)
Single precision only, non IEEE-754 arithmetic isn't a "real win for scientific computing". It's a win for getting the wrong answers really, really quickly.
Yes, I know that there are problems for which the limitations of the SPEs don't kill the accuracy of the solution, but people (even scientists) rarely do a complete analysis of whether or not their problem is one of those before they set off to use the new faster hotness.
Re:Does Terra-Soft pay Slashdot? (Score:3, Informative)
As somebody who bought a PowerBook G3 when they came out specifically to play with Yellow Dog Linux on it, my experience was the opposite. Perhaps you just don't like SuSE?
My experience was that Yellow Dog was a half-assed port of RedHat to PPC, and Debian for PPC was Debian. With Yellow Dog you felt like you almost had a working RedHat system, but things were out of date, and many of the things you were used to were unavailable. Debian had none of those problems.
Admittedly, I've not gone back and tried Yellow Dog since 2001, but why would I after that initial experience, and the existence of other high-quality, mainstream options?
Re:The cell was NOT developed for the PS3 (Score:2, Informative)
Cell was the brainchild of Sony's hardware genius Kutagari and IBM's Hofstee...
Kutagari may have been thinking about consoles when he came up with the idea that would become the Cell BEA, but when development started on the Cell the design team's goal was high performance in a many different applications. Many of the Cell processors sold thus far have been in PlayStations, and it may be their most visible application, but I believe the PlayStation represents only a fraction of Cell's potential utility.
But Does It Run Ubuntu? (Score:2, Informative)
I hope the appearance of the Cell in actual PCs, not just the RAM-hardwired and GPU-lockedout (and no PCI) PS3 will reignite official support of Cell Ubuntu. Until last year, Ubuntu was officially supporting the PPC-based Cell version of their distro. Now it's just a community effort that needs your help [psubuntu.com]. Ubuntu is working, with some bugs (right now mainly the installer, and beta bugs in the Cell SPE video driver). If there were more diverse Cell PC HW, and a larger, more diverse developer community coming with it, there might be better Ubuntu. Since both the PS3 and this notebook are primarily useful as workstations and media stations, Ubuntu really is the best flavor out there that also keeps up with the other Linux desktop productivity apps.
Not a Cell CPU (Score:3, Informative)
On closer examination of the specs, this laptop isn't a Cell CPU at all. It's Toshiba's "Spurs" coprocessor, which is like a Cell but with the central PPC core stripped out and only half the Cell's 4 SPE DSPs, hooked up to a Pentium Core 2 Duo instead. That might be an interesting platform for experimenting with Linux and DSP, but it's not a Cell, and has practically no relation to any Cell/Linux project, nor Ubuntu in particular.
Both the Slashdot story and the actual article lie about the CPU being a "Cell". How stupid.
Re:18.4" Screen: Laptop? (Score:1, Informative)
1680/945 = 16:9 aspect ratio
Re:ps3 emulation! (Score:4, Informative)
The PS3 uses one cell processor, which has 8 SPEs, one of which has been dctivated so it only uses 7.
Apple is already planning for similiar designs... (Score:1, Informative)
with Apple's grand central, using hardware like this will soon be automatic on mac's. Grand Central was designed to split up processing into 'streams' much like a packet switched network. Then delegate those streams/packets to whichever piece of hardware is available to process them. The practical side of this is that all code will be able to use any specialized hardware such as cell SPE's that may be onboard, without having the developers to actually code for it. nice