Toshiba reveals PlayStation 3 powered supercomputer laptop

Davey Winder
Tuesday, 24 June 2008 05:46

Your IT - Home IT

The new Toshiba Qosmio G50 laptop will feature a SpursEngine Quad Core HD processor. Based upon the same Cell design as found in the PS3 and the world's fastest supercomputer, is it more laptop than anyone really needs?

Jointly developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, Cell processors were first seen in the PlayStation 3 games console. More recently IBM took 12,240 of them and, along with 6,562 dual-core AMD Opterons, built a supercomputer. Not just any supercomputer, you understand, but the faster computer on the planet.

How fast? How does 1.026 petaflops hit you! A petaflop is one thousand trillion calculations per second, which is quite a lot.

So one has to wonder just what Toshiba are thinking of when it decides to stuff one into a laptop of all things. I mean, you would have to be one serious gamer or have some kind of Dr Evil world domination plan to need those floating point supercomputer calculations on your lap, surely?

To be fair to Toshiba, it hasn't opted for 12,000 Cell processors. In fact, it hasn't even opted for one. The SpursEngine version it has used is more like half a Cell processor. Instead of having eight dedicated co-processors for handling those intensive operation functions it only has four.

Well that's OK then.

Oh, and if you don't like the SpursEngine label then Toshiba are quite happy for you to call it a Quad Core HD Processor instead. That's what Toshiba is doing in all the marketing material at any rate.