Thomson Canopus, Thomson’s arm in Japan focusing on video editing cards, launches the Firecoder Blu graphic card that is based on Toshiba’s SpursEngine chip. Toshiba’s SpursEngine is bascially a slim-down version of PS3’s Cell Broadband Engine microprocessor, which comes with only four cores and without an on-chip controller CPU.
The Firecoder Blu support hardware decoding of MPEG2 and MPEG4 AVC/H.264 video and DVD/Blu-ray encoding. It does also transcoding AVCHD from and to MPEG2 at up to 5 times faster than real time.
The Firecoder Blu utilize PCI Express x1 interface and works with Windows Vista and XP. Thomson Firecoder Blu will be available in December in the US for $599.
