Toshiba’s SpursEngine Chip to Improve Internet Videos with PS3 Tech

Toshiba’s new SprusEngine chip can’t do anything about annoying internet memes, but it does promise to include their image quality a bit.

The new SpursEngine is a quad-core chip based upon Cell architecture (think of it as a scaled back PS3). Bundled in Toshiba’s upcoming Qosmio multimedia laptops, the chip not only assists the Core 2 Duo in intense calculations and decodes MPEG2 and MPEG4, but it will “clean up” internet video like a sort of YouTube upscaler.

This video enhancement only works through Internet Explorer when video is played back full screen. And the technology is Japan-only for the time being, arriving in laptops this week that start at $US2,000. Maybe if the SpursEngine simply blocked all YouTube content, we’d have a deal. [Network World]