According to recent news, Leadtek plans to release a Cell processor (the thing in the PS3) based PCI-E add in card, at a price point of $300.
According to the article, it turns out this is not a graphics card at all. It is actually a card capable of ” encoding and decoding H.264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video streams in hardware.”
In terms of hardware, the card seems to be capable. It contains a 4 core based Cell (the SpursEngine SE1000), of the same type that Toshiba uses in its laptops for video manipulation. It also comes with 128mb of XDR (the really fast, really expensive RAM used in the PS3 and made by Rambus).
But do you know what else is capable of that? Every graphics card made since 2007. And you know what else? They don’t all cost $300.
So if somoene can tell me exactly what the target market for this is, I would appreciate it. Maybe you can use it to play PS3 games?