Toshiba launches SpursEngine Partners Group - With third-party partner companies to perform collaborative marketing
Toshiba launches SpursEngine Partners Group
With third-party partner companies to perform collaborative marketing
Toshiba Semiconductor Company(hereafter, Toshiba) launched SpursEngine Partners Group and hosted the first meeting on July 25th, before SpursEngine Developers Forum 2008. SpursEngine Partners Group is a set of third-party companies who do business using SpursEngine, the streaming processor Toshiba developed based on Cell Broadband Engine. Participants are 12 companies in total, such as software/hardware developers, development tool venders, application venders, and/or system integrators.
Toshiba's purpose to launch the Partners Group is to jointly develop businesses involving SpursEngine and to support SpursEngine users in a wide range of forms. Specifically, such activities include co-marketing, market announcement in cooperation, joint demonstrations/exhibitions at a variety of tradeshows, and so on.
As the first activity, participating partner companies introduced their products or services related to SpursEngine in SpursEngine Developers Forum 2008, including demonstrations. Also, Toshiba is planning to provide exhibition space for SpursEngine Partners Group within their booth at CEATEC JAPAN 2008, held from September 30th to October 4th, so that each SpursEngine partner company can demonstrate their offerings.
Participating companies include Leadtek Research, a PC board manufacturer; ArcSoft, Corel, CRI Middleware, CyberLink, Jungle, Pegasys, and Trendy as application vendors; Fixstars, FUJISOFT, IBM Japan, and Toshiba Information Systems as system integrators.
Leadtek has already developed a PCI-Express board, WinFast PxVC1100, equipped with SpursEngine. Corel provides DVD Movie Writer for Toshiba, a HD-capable video editing application for Toshiba's Qosmio notebook PC. CRI Middleware is planning to port their codec software, Sofdec, on to SpursEngine. Toshiba Information Systems provides development tools for SpursEngine besides contracted business of software/hardware design. Toshiba is to support these activities of each company from behind.
SpursEngine is a stream processor developed by Toshiba. It has four SPEs, or Synergistic Processor Elements, originally designed for Cell Broadband Engine, and codec (encoder and decoder) logic for both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC/H.264. SpursEngine is included in Qosmio, Toshiba's audiovisual notebook PC, which they started shipping in this June. SpursEngine can help reduce time for transcoding from MPEG-2 to H.264 up to about 1/10 of time using a Core2 Duo (2.8GHz) CPU only.