Leadtek to Launch SpursEngine-based Graphics Card Next Week

Computer graphics card maker Leadtek will put on sale next week its first card based on Toshiba's SpursEngine graphics co-processor, it said Wednesday.

The WinFast PxVC1100 will hit stories in Japan's Akihabara electronics district from Nov. 19 and will be cost about ¥29,800 (US$305).

The SpursEngine is based on the same architecture as the Cell Broadband Engine microprocessor that powers the PlayStation 3 console and was partly developed by Toshiba. While the Cell contains a Power PC core and eight "Synergistic Processing Elements" cores, the SpursEngine contains only four of the SPE cores.

The chip contains a hardware encoder and decoder for MPEG2 and MPEG4 AVC/H.264 video and is designed to be used as a co-processor in a PC for handling of calculation-intensive work such a real-time high-definition graphics processing.

The single-slot PCI Express card comes with 128M bytes of XDR DRAM memory and drivers for Windows XP and Vista. Leadtek is targeting it at applications such as video editing and authoring, video upscaling, transcoding of video formats and playback of high-definition video.

Overseas launch plans have not yet been announced.