At the COOL Chips VIII event held in Yokohama, Japan, Toshiba made the first public demo of the Cell microprocessor in action.

In the demo, 48 MPEG-2 streams stored on a HDD were read, decoded and projected to a 1080i resolution display divided into 8 x 6 cells, each of which showed a different video fitted to the cell size. The company expects to use this technology to display moving thumbnails in a video list.

The Cell architecture has debuted in a configuration of 9 independent cores: one PowerPC Processing Element (PPE) and eight Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). The PPE and SPEs are different, but all eight SPEs are identical to one another. In this demo, of the eight synergistic processor elements, six were used for decoding 48 MPEG-2 streams and one was used for scaling the screen. The remaining SPE can be used for a completely different processing.