Nikkei Electronics Asia -- February 2010
Analysis
Toshiba's Cell REGZA: The Television of Tomorrow

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Feb 1, 2010 00:07 Shinya Saeki, Fumitada Takahashi

In December 2009, Toshiba Corp. released the Cell REGZA 55-inch LCD TV with high hopes. Drawing on the high processing performance of the multi-core Cell microprocessor, software processing provides a wealth of functions unbelievably beyond what is ¡Ècommon sense¡É in televisions today. Priced at an expensive one million yen, the set clearly bucks the trend for plunging digital home electronics prices, but what does it reveal about the future of the TV?

(Photo: Teru Kimura)

"We released the product at exactly the right time," confidently smiles Yuji Motomura, the man in charge of TV product planning at Toshiba's Digital Media Network Co., talking about the new model released in December 2009.

Fig. 1 Confidence in the LCD TV Business
The Cell REGZA was rolled out on a solid foundation established through the horizontal division of labor used in the REGZA series of conventional LCD TVs, and software-implemented function development (a). The firm¡Çs TV business did very well in the first half of 2009, rising to take the number-two share in the domestic LCD TV market (b). (Data for (b) courtesy of GfK Japan.)

He's referring to the Cell REGZA 55X1 (Fig. 1). It is the first LCD TV to mount the Cell Broadband Engine, a multi-core processor jointly developed by Toshiba, the Sony Group, and IBM Corp.

The Cell microprocessor was originally developed for the PlayStation 3 (PS3), the home gaming system sold by Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., in November 2006. The three developing firms have revealed that Cell was designed from the start to be utilized in other fields as well, and the chip has continued to attract attention in the electronics world ever since release. In the field of TVs and other digital home electronics in particular, there has been a mixture of high hopes for new applications taking advantage of its processing power, and concern that the high cost and other issues could make it impossible to adopt.

Three years after the PS3 went on sale, Toshiba shipped the first new application: the Cell REGZA. It acquired the Cell manufacturing line in Isahaya, Nagasaki prefecture, from Sony for about 90 billion yen in February 2008. While Sony seems to have backed off from its Cell-based plans for the home, Toshiba has released a new TV as a strategic product designed to support the recovery of its semiconductor business, while at the same time driving TV business growth.