Toshiba reveals PlayStation 3 powered supercomputer laptop

Davey Winder
Tuesday, 24 June 2008 05:46

Your IT - Home IT

The first machines are likely to go sale exclusively in Japan in July, at a cost of around AUD $3000. The Qosmio G50 SpursEngine will run at 1.5GHz peaking at 48 Gflops, and needs up to 20 watts of power as well as some dedicated RDRAM. The thing that is perplexing some tech savvy observers is why it is needed at all when the G50 will also feature a NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT with 512MB of DDR3.

Toshiba says that the OS will itself run on an Intel Core 2 Duo chip, while the SpursEngine deals with stuff like processing high-definition video. In fact, Toshiba is pushing things like an ability to upscale standard to high def video and perform real time digital TV to MPEG4 transcoding as good reason to buy into the supercomputer laptop dream.

I suspect early adopters and rich geeks will rush to purchase the 18.4" high def screened machine with its 500GB hard drive and dual digital TV tuners. The rest of us will wait and see what applications can actually make use of all that power, and how long it can last away from the mains socket before splashing the cash.

So far we know that DVD MovieFactory will support/ the SpursEngine. We know because it has been seen demonstrating the power on tap in this machine. It took a 3GHz Intel Core 2 Quad CPU twice as long to transcode some 1080p H.264 video to 480p as the machine with the SpursEngine running.