Toshiba has announced a successor to the Cell processor,designed specifically for high-end TVs.Called Cevo Engine,it is a three-die system-in-package that includes a three-level hierarchy of co-processors.According to a Toshiba spokesman,though computationally powerful,the existing Cell processor dissipates too much heat to be used inside a TV.The most significant chip in Cevo is a 40nm device with six ARM Cortex-A9 cores running at just under 600MHz.
Attached to three of the A9s is the first level of processing support:ARM Neon general-purpose SIMD co-processors.On the same silicon is a Toshiba designed media processor which delivers the second level of co-processing.To provide closely-couple memory,a custom DRAM is directly flip-chip mounted on the processor die.The mounting technique,which uses solder bumps between the two die with no interposer layers,was developed in-house and provides a 512bit wide data path.
Beside this die sandwich in the package is the third die,a 65nm CMOS chip with four hardware accelerators for TV-specific processing,including one for 2D to 3D conversion.Once again connectivity is unusual.This chip has normal wire bonds around its edge,as well as wire bonds to its heart which link directly to the processor die.Toshiba is concentrating on 3D viewing with in its top-end HD TVs,using technology including 2D to 3D conversion based on scene geometry extraction-developed from the firm's research lab in Cambridge.Running at full throttle,Cevo is capable of calculating the nine separate images required to give eight people glasses-less 3D viewing on a single TV screen.
Another technology developed at the Cambridge lab that will be offered on Cevo-equipped TVs soon is gesture and face recognition.This uses a camera built into the TV to image the viewers,and from this information up to four different viewers in a household can be automatically recognised-allowing their personal viewing and programming preferences to be loaded.Gesture recognition allows viewers to,for example,change the audio volume with a sweep of the hand.
