The Evangelist

Worldwide Technology News

A while back Toshiba demonstrated a Cell processor-based SpursEngine chip in a laptop (yes, the same Cell processor tech that is found in Sony's Playstation 3). Although the Cell processor was shown to be powerful at allowing for several new innovative applications in their demo, the usefulness of these chips is really for encoding and transcoding MPEG4 and MPEG2 AVCHD/H.264 codecs.

The Firecoder Blu is a card meant for these purposes, and accelerates encoding and transcoding, possibly up to five times faster than real-time. The device could possibly prove useful to those who are into Blu-Ray. With the power of modern GPUs, however, and with new programs coming out that can take advantage of their capabilites in encoding and transcoding videos, the question is whether the projected $599 pricetag will really be worth it. This is yet to be seen.

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for your comments.