SpursEngine

SpursEngine is a microprocessor from Toshiba built as a media oriented coprocessor, designed for 3D- and video processing in consumer electronics such as set-top boxes and computers. The SpursEngine processor is also known as the Quad Core HD processor. Announced 20 September 2007.^[1]

An illustration of the SpursEngine SE1000 processor

The SpursEngine is a stream processor powered by four Synergistic Processing Elements (SPE),^[2] also used in the Cell processor featured in Sony PlayStation 3. These processing elements are fed by on chip H.264 and MPEG-2 codecs and controlled by an off die host CPU, connected by an on chip PCIe controller^[2] (in contrast to the Cell processor which has an on chip CPU (the PPE) doing similar work). To enable smoother interaction between the host and the SpursEngine Toshiba also integrated a simple proprietary 32-bit control core. The SpursEngine employs dedicated XDR DRAM as its working memory.^[2]

The SpursEngine is designed to work at much lower frequencies than the Cell and Toshiba has also optimized the circuit layout of the SPEs to reduce the size by 30%.^[3] The resulting chip consumes 10-20 W of power.

The SpursEngine is accessible to the developer from a device driver developed for Windows and Linux systems. Software supporting the SpursEngine is limited and is primarily in the realm of video editing and encoding.^[4]

Technical specification

Logic schematic of the SpursEngine chip^[2]

The first generation of SpursEngine processors are specified as follows:

• Built with a 65 nm bulk CMOS fabrication process with 7 layers of copper interconnect^[2]
• 9.98 mm × 10.31 mm (102.89 mm²) large die^[2]
• 239.1 million transistors (Logic: 134 M, SRAM:104.8 M)^[2]
• Thermal design power: <20 W^[2]
• Max frequency: 1.5 GHz^[2]
• Packaged in a 624 pin FC-BGA (Flip Chip-Ball Grid Array)^[2]
• 48 GFLOPS peak performance (12 GFLOPS per SPU @ 1.5 GHz)^[5]

Commercialization

In April 2008 Toshiba shipped samples of the SpursEngine SE1000 device, a PCIe-based reference board.^[5]

• The accelerator card connects to a 1x PCI Express bus and has 128 MB XDR DRAM with 12.8 GB/s bandwidth.
• Leadtek is producing the WinFast PxVC1100 and HPVC1100, internal and external PCIe accelerators based on the SE1000 platform.^[6][7][8]
• Thomson-Canopus has announced the Firecoder Blu, a PCIe accelerator based on the SE1000 platform.^[9]

Toshiba included the SpursEngine processors in their Qosmio laptops, models F50, G50 and G55, in the third quarter of 2008.

See also

• Cell (microprocessor)