Ok, that's awesome.

[schild]

From Team Xbox:

At the COOL Chips VIII event held in Yokohama, Japan, Toshiba made the first public demo of the Cell microprocessor in action.

In the demo, 48 MPEG-2 streams stored on a HDD were read, decoded and projected to a 1080i resolution display divided into 8 x 6 cells, each of which showed a different video fitted to the cell size. The company expects to use this technology to display moving thumbnails in a video list.

The Cell architecture has debuted in a configuration of 9 independent cores: one PowerPC Processing Element (PPE) and eight Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). The PPE and SPEs are different, but all eight SPEs are identical to one another. In this demo, of the eight synergistic processor elements, six were used for decoding 48 MPEG-2 streams and one was used for scaling the screen. The remaining SPE can be used for a completely different processing.

That's...a lot of processing. And if you're wondering - 48 MPEG-2 streams are damned impressive. Hell, I'd like whatever harddrive they were using as well.

[Trippy]

From Team Xbox:

In the demo, 48 MPEG-2 streams stored on a HDD were read, decoded and projected to a 1080i resolution display divided into 8 x 6 cells, each of which showed a different video fitted to the cell size. The company expects to use this technology to display moving thumbnails in a video list.

Hell, I'd like whatever harddrive they were using as well.

Each stream was presumably encoded at a relatively low bit rate given that they were going to be scaled down to something like 240 x 180 resolution. So let's assume a very generous (for the eventual size) 2 megabits per second data rate per stream. That multiplies out to 96 megabits per second for all 48 stream or 12 megabytes per second. A good desktop 7200 RPM hard drive can sustain about 35 megabytes per second data transfer rate on the slowest portions of the drive platter so it easily falls within the that range except for the fact that the drive has to seek all over the place to find the data for each stream which IDE drives don't do so well unless you have one of the latest NCQ drives and controller. A high end SCSI drive like one of those 15K RPM jobbies can do 60+ megabytes per second sustained on the slowest portions and has the command queuing capabilities of SCSI which optimizes the seeking pattern on the drive so they may have used something like that instead, particularly if the streams were encoded at more normal MPEG-2 encoding rates (e.g. 8 megabits/s * 48 = 48 megabytes/s).

[HaemishM]

As impressive as all that may be, I want to see games, list of release games and the like. The Cell is just a cute code name until they produce something that makes me want to buy it.