SpursEngine Partners to undertake co-marketing activities - Aiming at further business development

SpursEngine Partners to undertake co-marketing activities
Aiming at further business development

　During SpursEngine Developers Forum 2008 hosted by Toshiba Semiconductor Company on Friday, July 25, the member companies of SpursEngine Partners Group, launched on the same day, introduced their own products and services. Before member companies, Mr. Hiroshi Sekiguchi, Senior Manager, Advanced SoC Technical Marketing and System Application Engineering Department, System LSI Division at Toshiba, spoke on the aims of launching the Partners Group and related matters (Figure 1).

　SpursEngine Partners Group is a group of third-party companies involved in business related with SpursEngine, a stream processor Toshiba developed, inheriting the design assets of Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.). Participating companies, twelve in total, include software/hardware developers, development tool venders, application software venders, system integrators, and so on. "The purposes to launch the Partners Group are to jointly explore SpursEngine business opportunities and to support the user companies in a variety of ways. Specific activities include co-marketing, joint announcement, demos jointly performed at various tradeshows, and so on," explained Mr. Sekiguchi. At the Forum venue, display spaces for the participating companies of the Partners Group were provided as well (Figure 2).

Products and services involving SpursEngine unveiled

　Seven companies out of twelve announced their products and services. The first speaker was Dr. Hiroki Nakano, IBM Distinguished Engineer at Yamato Laboratory, IBM Japan (Figure 3). The company sells IBM BladeCenter QS22, a blade system equipped with two processors based on the Cell/B.E. architecture. As to SpursEngine, they plan to work on consulting on software porting, development of customized boards and software, and so forth, on a contract basis. "With SpursEngine, we are targeting a market segment where the required performance is lower than that of Cell/B.E. and higher than PowerPC," said Mr. Nakano.

　Fixstars, who deals with development of Cell/B.E. software, utilizes know-hows gained from their software development for Cell/B.E. towards SpursEngine. The company says they want to undertake SpursEngine businesses such as development of the middleware, porting the middleware to Linux, and development of the applications. Also, they are to consider collaboration with Taiwan’s Leadtek Research Inc., who manufactures SpursEngine boards. “We have been engaged in the middleware development from the development phase of SpursEngine. For example, we worked on a part of development of the hand gesture middleware that Toshiba demonstrated at CEATEC JAPAN 2007,” emphasized Mr. Akira Miki, the company’s President/CEO (Figure 4 and 5).

　FUJISOFT, a system integrator, regards embedded technology as an integral part of their business. The company’s embedded business ranges broadly from software to hardware development. FUJISOFT deals with hardware OEM, too, through OA Laboratory, a FUJISOFT subsidiary. "We also toot charge of a part of the application development for Qosmio equipped with SpursEngine. Utilizing the results, we plan to develop businesses around SpursEngine," said Mr. Teruo Katsurai, Assistant Manager, Control Technology Sales Department, System Development Business Group at FUJISOFT (Figure 6). For example, he stated FUJISOFT can develop software that makes best use of SpursEngine’s performance, by using such techniques as parallelization, effective utilization of SPE (Synergistic Processor Element) registers, SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) coding, etc. Also, as to the software on the host PC side, they can perform quick development with low cost, utilizing the accumulated code.

　Toshiba Information Systems took charge of developing the reference board, development environment/basic software of the Reference Kit, and so on, during the development phase of Cell/B.E. With SpursEngine also, they played a similar role. "Utilizing such experiences, we will offer system development solutions from hardware to software of SpursEngine," said Mr. Masanori Furumaki, Group Leader at Embedded Systems Platform Solution Division of the company (Figure 7). Specifically, they are to work on development of the driver due to host OS replacement, customization of the reference board or software development tool for SPE, and so on (Figure 8).

Figure 7:Mr. Masanori Furumaki, Group Leader, Embedded Systems Platform Solution Division at Toshiba Information Systems

Figure 8:SpursEngine evaluation system by Toshiba Information Systems

　Mr. Misao Matsushita, Technical Officer, R&D Department and General Manager at CRI Middleware, a middleware developer for entertainment software, stated, "we will offer middleware that allows to use SpursEngine easily and helps bring out the best possible performance (Figure 9). He listed, as their strengths, their working experiences in video playback middleware, middleware for PLAYSTATION 3 powered by Cell/B.E., and/or implementation of middleware to embedded systems centered around game consoles, in which they have been engaged so far. Utilizing the know-hows given such experiences, they will develop the codec (MPEG-2 and H.264) middleware based on Sofdec, their middleware product, as the first step (Figure 10). He said they would secondly develop middleware that makes use of the encoder, decoder and SPEs integrated on SpursEngine.

Figure 9:Mr. Misao Matsushita, Technical Officer, R&D Dept. and GM at CRI Middleware

Figure 10:Demo of CRI Middleware's codec software under development

　Mr. Shinichi Bitoh, Managing director and General manager of CyberLink Japan, which sells video editing software for consumers, showed market data on how popular digital cameras over 10 Mega pixels, the next generation DVD, and full-HD displays were. "The growth rate of digital media market for the past 3 years is record-high in the past 20 years," explained Mr. Bitoh (Figure 11). The company is to provide solutions in video editing software using SpursEngine to such a market. CyberLink demonstrated PowerDirector, video editing software, supporting SpursEngine in this forum (Figure 12). A PC equipped with a Core 2 Duo (2.4GHz) was used to perform transcoding from MPEG-2 to H.264. SpursEngine helped shorten the transcoding time from 4’52,” processed with software only, to 1’22.”

Figure 11:Mr. Shinichi Bito, Managing director and GM of CyberLink Japan

Figure 12:CyberLink's demo of PowerDirector powered by SpursEngine

　Leadtek Research Inc. was quick to develop WinFastPxVC1100, a SpursEngine board. Mr. K.S. Lu, the company's Chairman/CEO, explained the company overview, and thereafter Mr. Naoki Kaneko, Project Manager at Audio/Video Communication Product BU, introduced WinFast PxVC1100 they developed (Figure 13). WinFast PxVC1100 has 128 Kbytes XDR DRAM in addition to SpursEngine (Figure 14). The card has PCI-Express interface and low profile. The company will start shipping the samples bundled with DVD MovieFactory, video editing software by Corel Corp. in late July 2008. Also, they plan to support Super Resolution (Toshiba's upconversion) software that can fully take advantage of SpursEngine’s performance from the middle September and beyond.

Figure 13:Mr. K.S.Lu, Chairman/CEO of Leadtek Research Inc. (right), and Mr. Naoki Kaneko, Project Manager at Audio/Video Communication Product BU (left)

Figure 14:Leadtek's PC board, WinFast PxVC1100 equipped with SpursEngine

　In addition, Corel Corp. showed an encoding demo with DVD MovieFactory, a video editing software package supporting SpursEngine, though they gave no speech (Figure 15). DVD MovieFactory is bundled with SpursEngine-powered Qosmio notebook PC that Toshiba started shipping this year.