Toshiba recently announced plans to bring its Cell TVs to the European market later this year. But what makes a Cell TV so different from a normal HDTV?
Cell processors emerged from a joint-venture between IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. As such, the new type of processor is likely to crop up all over the market in the next few years. Many readers will already have used one in a Sony PlayStation 3, for example. The processors are also already in use in some professional IT equipment, but Toshiba’s imminent introduction of Cell TVs looks like the first time that we, the general public, will directly witness the power of Cell.
Toshiba's SpursEngine is one form of Cell processor.
The chip works like the dual-core processors found in many modern PCs, except that instead of two cores, it has eight. Toshiba’s European marketing manager, Sascha Lange, said that the Cell TVs will have 143 times the power of today’s standard TV. Of course, claims like this are hard to confirm, as we don’t know how Toshiba defines a “standard TV”. But we can be sure that the new processors will bring massive – and we mean massive – increases in processing power. So massive, in fact, that the TVs can record eight TV channels simultaneously and even perform real-time 2D-to-3D conversion. Come again? Yes, the TVs will take 2D signals and add depth information based on a set of educated guesses about which objects appear in the foreground and background of the picture. On a Cell TV, users will be able to watch everything – football, documentaries, even home videos – in 3D.
Toshiba is also planning to introduce an apps store, allowing developers to create various small pieces of software that could then run on consumers’ TVs. Other future developments include gesture control, whereby viewers will be able to select content to view simply by moving their hands in front of the screen.
In other words, Cell does all the stuff you see in science-fiction films – except it will soon be a reality in the living room. Well, that all depends on the price, and since Toshiba hasn’t even decided on a final specification for Europe, it’s impossible to say what this will be. All we know for sure is that it’ll be a lot!