Audio Video News

Despite the air being sucked out of the room by the HD-DVD presentation that kicked-off today's Toshiba's CES press conference (you'll recall Warner just dumped Tosh's HD DVD format for Blu-ray), there was one non-HD-DVD nugget of information that really caught my attention.

Several months ago I reviewed Sony's Playstation 3, for which I did lots of research on the new Cell Broadband Engine, the CPU that drives the PS3. This chip was developed in partnership between Sony, IBM and (you guessed it) Toshiba.

We know what Sony is doing with their piece of the Cell pie. IBM, meanwhile, plans to use the Cell as the basis of its future supercomputers. So that just left Toshiba. What did they want with a processor capable of 1 trillion calculations per second?

That other shoe has finally dropped, and today they announced that they expect to ship displays this fall that will feature the Cell processing engine. While detailed information wasn't available, it appears these displays will use the Cell to improve the quality of standard definition (SD) video as well as display multiple high-def images on screen at once. If nothing else, they will be the smartest HDTVs on the market!
-John Sciacca