When we first heard that Toshiba was working on taking the SpursEngine which is a part of the Sony PlayStation 3 Cell processor and use them in PCs, we were left scratching our heads.

Toshiba hopes that brining the SpursEngine to a PCI Express slot on your PC might just be what the doctor ordered to move some extra chips, while at the same time provide the ability to handle the encoding or decoding of HD MPEG2, MPEG4, AVC and H.264 on the fly without using any CPU power to do so.

The cards will use a PCI Express x1 interface with 128MB of XDR high performance memory. According to reports, the card will only require a heat sink with no fan, but recent prototypes have included a fan.

As things stand at the moment, Toshiba has been able to get Leadtek on board with the Winfast PxVC 1100 which they recently showed off at the Ceatec show in Japan. In addition to Leadtek, Thomson has also signed on to produce cards, as well, but little is known about their effort so far other than they are working on one that is slated to arrive in the November time frame.

Toshiba believes in the technology so much that they have already put the SpursEngine video cards in the company’s own Qosmio G50 and F40 laptops which were announced in June.

In the real word it is really unknown as to what kind of impact the SpursEngine will have in the market. Both Nvidia and ATI offer video encoding in hardware, although the SpursEngine is meant to be faster at encoding video. However, at the estimated retail price of US$286 (€205/£161), we are just not sure how popular these cards will be.

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