**UPDATE: Toshiba’s Qosmio site is now working **
As mentioned here in May, Toshiba officially announced new versions of its high-end Qosmio notebook line today, including one that has the same video chip found in Sony’s PlayStation 3 game console.
The Qosmio G55 has the Cell, which was co-developed by Toshiba, Sony and IBM. Toshiba, however, calls it the Toshiba Quad Core HD processor. Other features of this model: a 500GB hard drive and a 18.4-inch widescreen display.
The special web site is supposed to be HERE but it looks like it hasn’t been updated yet. Check back later. Meanwhile, photo on right is from Toshiba and below is the prototype Qosmio with the Cell that I saw in May. Looks about the same to me.
According to today’s release, the new line, which includes the Qosmio X305 and Qosmio F55, will be available later this summer. But Toshiba doesn’t get into the details of price. The company tells me that today’s news is strictly to announce the new models. Specs and prices will come later.
Back in May when I visited the Toshiba’s headquarters in Irvine, they demonstrated the new Qosmio and said the price was $1,700, which is much less than the original $3,000-plus tags of the original Qosmio’s. Read more about the specs on my last post, “Peek at Toshiba laptop with PlayStation 3’s Cell chip.”
The benefits of this new chip, according to Toshiba, are to speed up the process of converting or transcoding a homemade movie to a watchable movie on DVD.
Explains Toshiba: A 10-minute video can take an hour or more to transcode using a high performance processor. Offloading that work from the CPU to the TOSHIBA Quad Core HD Processor boosts the transcoding speed up to 10 times faster.
The 10-times faster claim is based on a Toshiba notebook with the new chip vs. one without.
Tamara 'the Gadgetress' Chuang
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