Toshiba reveals the Cell: The world's first supercomputer TV

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

 1 of 5

Gallery

Posted on 7 Jan 2010 at 04:44

CES 2010: Toshiba declared its intent to dominate the TV world at CES 2010 by introducing the Cell TV. With eight Cell processors – the same chip that powers Sony’s PlayStation – Toshiba made bold claims about performance, declaring its chip had "ten times the speed of a Core 2 Duo processor". To be precise, the eight-core chip – with each core running at 3.2GHz – has a theoretical performance of around 200GFLOPS.

Certainly in a game of Top Trumps it would win on all the key specs: forget 120Hz, the Cell’s refresh rate is a remarkable 480Hz. Brightness is more than double that of existing competitors, with 1,250 candelas per square metre compared to 500. There are 512 areas with a dedicated backlight; most LCD TVs are happy with 96 areas. And all that leads to a dynamic contrast of 9,000,000:1.

While we’re sceptical of dynamic contrast as a concept, we can’t dispute the quality of the pictures. Even in a well-lit conference room, we consistently saw attendees’ eyes being attracted by the images rather than the speaker – from 50 feet away. Colours, whether the natural greens of a forest or the striking reds of Japanese palaces, looked fantastic.

The sheer amount of processing power on-board means this is an incredibly versatile television. "With Cell TV, everything is 3D" said Scott Ramirez, vice president of marketing for the TV arm of Toshiba US. That could be Blu-ray movies, sport, or even your favourite soap: technology and some clever tricks will cope with the conversion, and even 3D TV will be transmitted at 240Hz to each eye.

There are a couple of gotchas. As with most 3D technologies, you’ll need special glasses to appreciate the effect. You’ll also have to a while for Cell TVs to go on sale, and when they finally arrive the price will be steep. A straight conversion of the Yen price – Cell TVs are already on sale in Japan – shows the cost will be around 7,000 euros, or £6,300 for the 55in version. Two Cell TVs will be introduced in Europe: the 46in and 55in versions.

Both screens will have a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, but Toshiba claims its SuperRes technology will upscale even low-quality content. “People are going to get a lot of content from the internet,” said Scott Ramirez, vice president of marketing for the TV arm of Toshiba US. “Sometimes it's worse than SD and it's noisy. The quality of all that content [on a Cell TV], even the lower quality, is stunning.”

Ramirez claimed it’s this quality that will bring added appeal to another of the Cell TV’s interesting extra features: video conferencing. "It has the camera, it has the microphone. But what makes ours different is super resolution technology. How will you look at 55in [on a different TV]? With our tech, you'll look crisp."

With a 1TB hard disk inside the US version – the exact specification of the European version is yet to be confirmed – there’s plenty of space even for high-definition content, and the Cell is capable of recording eight channels simultaneously.

Author: Tim Danton in Las Vegas