Toshiba unveils "SpursEngine" stream processor derived from Cell/B.E.

Pardon my ignorance. In your opinion, what are the typical use cases and problems you want to solve using a SPUREngine in a CE device ?

 

Well, that's something we'll still have to think of.
Most companies involved need quite some image processing power.
They go from traffic control over chip inspection to medical imaging and visual sorting machines.

So we have quite a range of stuff to try out.

 

Leadtek is to exhibit the WinFast PxVC1100 PCI-Express card based on SpursEngine at CEATEC JAPAN 2008 on Sep 30 - Oct 4. It has 128MB XDR DRAM. Its functions by bundled Corel DVD MovieFactory and WinDVD include video authoring, super-resolution upconversion, transcoding and DVD/AVCHD disc authoring/playback.

http://www.leadtek.co.jp/news_release/ceatec2008.html

 

The release date for WinFast PxVC1100 in Japan has been announced as Nov. 14 for 29800 yen (300$).
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2008/1029/leadtek.htm

Also this is a report from CEATEC 2008 on Sep 30 about which the post above mentions.
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2008/0930/ceatec03.htm

 

Some benches
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2008/1120/tawada157.htm

With all the crappy result of GPU transcoding. I am looking into this product. Anyone find any first hand impression of the product ?

 

Hmm, I can't tell which is better, higher, lower, or if the benchmarks are a mixture of the two!

 

From the results it looks that only H.264 encodes show big improvements. Encoding to MPEG-2 is probably just too fast both on the accelerate and on the CPU so the bottleneck is at other places.

For example, when doing DV-AVI to MPEG-2 SD, the SpursEngine runs at 84.07 fps and the 4 core CPU runs at 82.78 fps. When using the SpursEngine the CPU usage is indeed lower at 34% instead of 70% when using CPU. However, when doing HDV -> AVC-HD, SpursEngine runs at 32.77 fps while the quad core CPU runs at only 5.02 fps. If the quality is comparable then it's quite an acceleration.

 

i think its better with non english URLs to push them through the auto translator to make them somewhat readable by most people here, so heres this one
http://translate.google.com/transla...120/tawada157.htm&sl=ja&tl=en&history_state0=

i find it rather odd that neather they, or indeed any URL iv found so far, as regards this chip/card review even mentions the basic things such as general standards Profiles or levels used in testing,operation etc.

such basic information as is layed out in wiki for instance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Levels

the main options current pro video people and devs at doom9 for instance being
"High Profile (HiP): The primary profile for broadcast and disc storage applications, particularly for high-definition television applications (this is the profile adopted into HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc, for example). "

and level "4.1 245760 8192 50 Mbit/s 62.5 Mbit/s 150 Mbit/s 200 Mbit/s 1280x720@68.3 (9)
1920x1080@30.1 (4)
2048x1024@30.0 (4) "

after reading several Cell threads here over the years, we basicly know the expected potential for this chip, and its purpose, multi realtime PIP,upscaling,encoding.decoding,etc....

so the only real lack of information i cant seem to find is its general availablity and price, right now it seems people are expecting it to be around $300 US

but i find that a strange high price as it was billed as a cut down CELL that had the PPC core ripped out of it and replaced with something else cheaper(and no one really cared about porting linux to )to bring its costs down well below the real PPC CELL,etc... and its initial purpose was for making it cheap ($25/$35 US ? per 10K tray)and putting inside HDTVs?

for that $300 US price surely you would expect at the very least for this most basic PCI-E 1 PCB, a real PPC based CELL to at least the PS3 spec if not the better blade version?

the real question that needs an answer then, given they are now passing it off as the ultimate (as people/OEMs dont seem interested in putting the likes of the cheap ASIC Qpixel real-time H.264/MPEG4-AVC High Definition (level 4.1) Encoder/Decoder 275 mW of power QL305 on a cheap USB2 stick and selling it ASAP into the mass markets http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS10020+02-Jun-2008+BW20080602 ) and to be fair , currently THE Only mass end user HD AVC/H.264 H@L4.1+ Encoder/ Decoder/ Transcoder Co-Processor, is, is there an open SDK and working code examples to use directly on and for this PxVC1100 card /board ?

and if so, were is this focused open code BPI/SDK, and does anyone plan to, or has already written the FFMPEG/x264 spursEngine patchs to use this new WinFast PxVC1100 card ?, have any patchs already been reviewed and posted to the FFMPEG/x264 message boards for inclusion!

were can we get them and the documentation to use it to the fullest programaticly , or is this purely a closed windows only payware Transcodeing shop, that non windows devs/people cant utilise fully if at all?

 

Leadtek Japan says they're going to release the SDK for WinFast PxVC1100 around the end of this month. It contains Toshiba libraries except for hand gesture recognition and upconversion.
http://www.leadtek.co.jp/news_release/sdk_pxvc1100.html

Also, CRI Middleware (Japanese game middleware developer) is offering CRI SpursCoder which is a free H.264 encoder for SpursEngine.
http://criware.jp/spurscoder/

 

thanks for that "one".
http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&u=http://criware.jp/spurscoder/&sl=ja&tl=en

http://translate.google.com/transla...jp/news_release/sdk_pxvc1100.html&sl=ja&tl=en

i cant find a good translator for the text inside the spurscoder.zip
anyone care to do a better job than google on the CriSpursCoder.txt as it looks like it gives you the cli options you can use and shead some light on its abilitys even before anyone english speaking gets to buy and review one of these....
edit: tre31 did a translatiopn
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1239115#post1239115

i also read some info and a link on the doom9 and
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=15252430#post15252430 is full of info....

 

Is the Leadtek card available outside of Japan?
We'd like to get a few for playing around with, but availability seems nil here.

We already mailed with Leadtek, but they don't have a distributor in Belgium, and I don't see it anywhere available in surrounding countries.

Also the US doesn't seem to sell it, or I just don't know any of the retailers who'd sell stuff like that.

Also, does Amazon Japan deliver in Europe? Because that's the only place I found it on.

 

It will be available outside of Japan soon.
http://www.leadtek.com/spursengine/press_2.aspx?id=1

The SDK is available now.
http://www.leadtek.com/spursengine/

 

I got the SDK, but it isn't really useful without the card.
I've also seen the press release, but it doesn't really indicate when exactly it'll reach the west.
Seeing that it is completely sold out in Japan, it could still take a while if they want to keep up with demand over there, before releasing it anywhere else.

 

Leadtek "released" it a while back in Taiwan (I think it's about half months after Japan), but I don't know any one is actually selling these here. I'm also interested in this if the price is right, but from the Japanese price it seems to be pretty expensive, about US$300.

 

We got a reply from Leadtek, and they are willing to send it to us.
Price is $290, shipment included.

 

Coolio!

 

PC World: Toshiba's New Laptops Sharpen up Internet Video

http://www.pcworld.com/article/1634...ps_sharpen_up_internet_video.html?tk=rss_news

 

Surely it would be more efficient (in terms of silicon) to implement this type of feature on the GPU? Why add a new card for something a cheap GPU could handle equally welll or better?

 

Well maybe you should read above to judge what 'equally well or better' might be (post #85 on). And I think when we extrapolate out in that direction, suddenly die budgets aren't nearly as black and white.

 

Aren't those benchmarks just comparing against a CPU though? Obviously some effort has been put into writing an app that works on Spurs to improve internet video. Why can't a similar app we written in CUDA (or whatever other language GPU's can use) to do the same thing?

No doubt spurs is much smaller in terms of transistors than a mid range R7xx/G92b but does it cost less? And even then, if the GPU's are already present in the system, why not just use them instead of adding yet another co-processor?