The term "SpursEngine" might be a little new for some of us. It is the HD video processor Toshiba
used in its Qosmio G55 and F40 high-end media notebooks, where the company chose to call it "Toshiba Quad-Core HD processor". The SpursEngine tag comes in, where the processor uses Toshiba's proprietary technology to accelerate graphics and HD video across multiple heads. The chip itself is derived from the CELL Broadband Engine (CBE), the central processor that drives the Sony Playstation 3 gaming console. Toshiba made modifications to the design, by reducing the number of synergistic processing elements (dubbed cores) to 4, with the common PowerPC thread arbiter remaining. It is specialized for video processing.
Toshiba has already formed collaborations with Leadtek and Thomson, the two companies would be the first to come out with cards based on this infant video processor. As such, these are not stand-alone video-cards as of now (they lack output logic), they stand to demonstrate the GPUs design methodology in a PC environment, so the companies could gain foothold. The cards could serve as HD video processing solutions, for industrial, office or home use. Toshiba could put in its proprietary video processing technologies into this product. The Leadtek Winfast PxVC 1100 is pictured below. It uses PCI-Express x1 interface, and comes with 128 MB of XDR memory. The cards could be out by the end of this month, and could carry a steep price-tag of US $286, at least going by the listings in Japan.