As with all of Sony's processors, the Cell processor for the PS3 was widely hyped by Sony prior to the release of the PS3. The processor was to be co-developed by Toshiba, IBM, and Sony and expected to be seen in many more applications than just simply Sony's PlayStation 3. This has happened eventually with the Cell processor showing up in various servers and now the Cell processor is being used in additional hardware. Today we'll be taking a look at a video transcoding card from Leadtek which uses the Cell processor, the WinFast PxVC1100.

As mentioned Sony has used the Cell processor primarily for the PS3, IBM has built servers off of the Cell processor, and the third party here, Toshiba, is using it for multimedia uses for consumer devices. This card is a MPEG-2/H.264 transcoding card powered by Toshiba's high-performance stream processor SpursEngine based off a high performance Cell processor with four Synergistic Processing Element cores with emphasis on high performance floating point performance in a multimedia capacity.

What does this all means in laymen's terms? Fast, very fast and also low power consumption. Toshiba states that with a slower Pentium IV processor you can see up to 8x as fast transcoding and with a high-end quad core 4x.

For this card to work though it does require that the app support the SpursEngine and luckily Leadtek includes quite a few plug-ins with the card. They also include the full version of TMPGEnc 4.0 Express which is some of the best transcoding software on the market. It supports MPEG2, MPEG4, AVI, DIVX, QuickTime, H.264, DVD-Video, Blu-Ray, and also we found others such as x264 as long as the codecs for those other containers are installed. It also includes an editor for working with videos and support for Nvidia's CUDA. It'll be the main component of our testing as you'll see later on.

Two other plug-ins are also included, one for Adobe Premiere Elements 7 (this software is not included with the card) which also speeds up encoding and transcoding, and another for Corel DVD Movie Factory 5 which allows for upconversion of material to 1080p. This is called Super Resolution.

Leadtek states that other apps are being worked on for this card by Toshiba and others with Spurs Engine support such as upscaling YouTube videos, video indexing, and Gesture Interface Remote Control. Additionally, an SD is up on Leadkte's site with development tools and tutorials to give programmers a jump start with the SpursEngine if they'd like to add support in their app. http://www.leadtek.com/spursengine/

The card its self is very, very small enough to be low profile. It uses a PCI-E bus but requires more power from a floppy power connector. That said the overall draw is very low, Leadtek claims less than 35W. If you don't have one handy they include a molex-to-floppy 4-pin power adapter in addition to a low profile bracket and the previously mentioned software and plug-ins.