April 25^th, 2005 (10:05am) - The COOL Chips VIII event in Yokohama, Japan became the place that held Toshiba’s first public demo of the Cell microprocessor in action.

During the demo, 48 MPEG-2 streams that were stored on a hard drive were read, decoded, and then projected to a 1080i resolution display divided into 8x6 cells, each of which showed a different video that was fitted to the cell size. Toshiba expects this technology to be used to display moving thumbnails in a video list.

The Cell architecture has debuted in a configuration of 9 independent cores. It consists of one PowerPC Processing Element (PPE), as well as eight Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). While the PPE and SPEs are different, each of the eight SPEs are identical to each other. During the demo of the Cell processor, six of the SPEs were used to decode the 48 MPEG-2 streams, one was used for scaling the screen, and the remaining SPE could be used for a completely different processing job.