Those who have followed the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) will probably know that the Cell BE is a venture between IBM, Sony and Toshiba. I think everyone knows what Sony's idea for the Cell BE was, many know that IBM have blade servers that are Cell BE based. Toshiba's been keeping quiet. However, it seems like they are planning to release a stream processor - a device designed to handle streams of data such as video and audio - called SpursEngine.

Basically, the device looks a bit like a Cell BE processor without the general purpose processor, and only half the SPE units. Toshiba have thrown in some hardware to decode MPEG2 and H.264 for good measure. Without a general purpose processor, the SpursEngine requires a host CPU of some description to do some of the work. The resulting entity seems to be designed to act as a video processor on a PCI express card. With a power dissipation of between 10 to 20watts, it seems this could even appear in laptops.