Toshiba to demo vid streaming without any work by the CPU

Re: Personal use?

I think the personal use aspect is somewhat looking at the aspect that the end-user gets a stream from the server; but yes your right form the end user with a PC etc is not going to get excited by this at all.

Now what it does do is offer (assumed) that this chip will enable smaller video streaming servers using less power. Which is funny in many respects as in the real early days video streaming was in effect down to dedicated harware decoding chips, which all started to change to software around the pentium introduction, and now back again - flip flop between software and dedicated hardware. One of the main reasons for this was the introduction of the mmx instructions that enabled cpu's to take on some of that processing being done by dedicated chips. Now when the cost of electricity not getting cheaper the appeal of lower watt's performing chips starts to get higher.

Another aspect to all this is that over the past 10-15 years alot of standards have been improving (as they always do) and are now mature enough were you can do them in dedicated chipsets knowing they wont be utterly superceeded before the year is out. Or in other words the balance is there.

So for end user consumer kit this wont do anything as savings wont pan out for something they can already do. But for dedicated servers that are there just to stream to end users then this does allow for smaller kit and lower power usage. this is at teh cost of flexablity a normal CPU solution offers, but for the production life of the product, i dont see that being an issue at all.

Questions I have that would impact how alot of us would read this are:

1) how many streams per watt can this chip handle in contrast to CPu solution

2) why didn't they have a 2-chip solution that streams from memory and a chip that loads into memory the contents of the ssd etc and make the whole I/O contention a little more managable and also have a cip that can be used in other markets to load storage into memory (memory controllers another area, but you see the drift).

3) will more porn streams become cheaper

4) how does this compare to a GPU solution for performance and cost per stream in watts

5) how long before a new Annex of the standard is brought out making this look less appealing

Re: IT Rule

Exactly .//. WTF type of comments . do you see x86 Nexus core switches somewhere ? no ? well ... that's it, networking kit is ASIC only, FPGA/X86 assisted sometimes but that's it . And what's streaming ? network kit.

..Fail comments really.