The SpursEngine co-processor chip has just been released for testing purposes, as the Toshiba engineers  believe it is almost ready for common use. The processor was inspired by Sony’s PS3 Cell, and contains a hardware codec that decodes and encodes MPEG-2/H.264 videos and uses 4 processor cores instead of the 8 from Cell.

It was designed to handle video manipulation and graphics processing in real time and can handle all its assigned tasks. The processor already went through tests, like gesture control, HD video transcoding or facial recognition.

The co-processor has a great amount of power for multitasking and surely can speed up heavy-duty processing. Above all, its price will be somewhere around $50, so the quality/cost ratio is very good too.

Via