Live From CES: Breaking Out The Cell

The Cell is best known as the processor that lies at the heart of Sony's Playstation 3 games console. But that was never intended to be the only home for the Cell processor, jointly developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. The Cell's unique architecture make it incredibly good at chewing through multiple streams of multimedia data. Now, Toshiba appears to be finally getting a return on its investment with the unveiling of a prototype Cell-based set-top box for its line of TVs. The set-top box is designed to attack a knotty problem for TV makers -- watching non-HD media (such as a DVD) on a HD television set can often be a poor experience, as enlarging the low resolution material to fill the screen also enlarges flaws and video compression artifacts unnoticeable on earlier generations of TVs. The solution is known as upconverting, and it involves processing the incoming video ...