It is not surprising that High Definition contents require a lot of resources because of the higher amount of audio and video data to be processed. To avoid an excessive load on CPU the best solution is create a dedicated hardware that will take care of all HD encoding/decoding work.
Toshiba announced the start of sample shipping of the SpursEngine SE1000, a co-processor that integrates a hardware codec for Full HD encoding and decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 streams. This piece of hardware is claimed to offer high performance media streaming capabilities, with a clock frequency of 1.5GHz, while achieving low power consumption range of 10W to 20W.
The reference board has a PCI-Express edge connector that can connect to an x1 layer slot in a PC. Toshiba will also provide an integrated development environment (SPE compiler, SPE debugger, and performance monitor) and sample applications. More detailed specifications can be found here.
