Cell Processor to Power Toshiba Concept TV

Toshiba will harness the same processor used in the PlayStation 3 to upscale 1080p content to a whopping 4,000 by 2,000 pixels, which the company believes is the future of HD.

The brains behind the PlayStation 3 will also be under the hood on Toshiba’s next generation of ultra-high-end Regza TVs. Toshiba, which helped develop the Cell microprocessor alongside Sony and IBM, announced at its press conference Wednesday that the Cell processer would power a concept TV at this year’s booth.

According to Toshiba, the Cell processor is able to accomplish the same tasks as other video processors in a third the time, opening doors to new levels of digital processing. What kind of task could possibly require so much computational grunt? Scaling existing content to 4,000 by 2,000 pixels (four times the size of existing 1080p content), which the company believes will be the future of large-screen TVs.

The Cell TV, which will be a separate box connected to the actual display panel, will also house a separate hard drive for recording up to six HD channels simultaneously, and enable 3D graphical user interfaces that were previously unattainable.

Though the version of Cell TV shown at this year’s conference will not be on sale immediately, Toshiba has promised that it will be marketed in some capacity later in 2009.