Creative Zii (Cell Lite?)

[gongo]

Processor Overview
ZMS Media-Rich Application Processors.
The launch of the new ZMS-05 SoC (System-On-Chip) and the new Zii Platforms usher in the new era of StemCell Computing. The ZMS-05 processor combines a power media processing array with dual ARM cores, a rich set of integrated peripheral controllers plus a range of hardware platforms and advanced middleware to offer OEMs, ODMs, System Integrators and Software developers unlimited possibilities to quicky create and market a broad range of highly innovative products.

StemCell Computing

Building on the concept of natures Stem Cells, the basic building blocks of life, the ZMS architecture uses an array of media-optimized Processing Elements (PE) that can instantly develop into any of the specialized acceleration functions required of today's media rich devices. This approach offers significant advantages in terms of flexibility, scalability and features when designing next generation media intensive products:

Key Features

Flexibility - Fully programmable Processing Elements (PEs) provide Software Defined Silicon acceleration to deliver unrivalled flexibility to accelerate a broad range of media and compute intensive tasks
Scalability - 10 Gigaflops to Peta FLOPS (1015 floating point operation per second)
Energy Efficiency - High density StemCell architecture delivers more performance in less time for lower power consumption
Complete Solutions - Ready-for-Market Zii Platform Solutions
Processor Family

ZMS-05 - The latest, highly integrated SoC
DMS-02 - The First array based processor

Wow! More over at here http://ziilabs.com/index.asp

Zii Wii?
Processing Elements and Stemcell computing...not very Creative though... a suitable candidate for PSP2? Discuss.

 

[Asher]

Even if this is a legit cool tech (which I don't know), they didn't do themselves any favours with the obvious Wii knock-off name.

 

[gongo]

Each ZMS-05 SoC has dual ARM-926 cores with 48 programmable processor elements (PE) churning out 10GFlops of processing power. The chip is able to re-program itself in real-time to suit the needs of the application being executed, so there's probably a software stack on top controlling the PEs.

In addition, the Zii chip has the ability to shut down unused PEs and wake them up when necessary, thus saving power. For instance, more PEs will be activated when performing intensive tasks such as playing 3D games or playing back HD videos.

The advantage of this design is unlimited scalability. Creative is claiming a Teraflop computer with the footprint of an A4 sheet, and a Petaflop super computer with 147456 ZMS chips in 576 blade servers.

http://vr-zone.com/articles/creativ...s--nano-size-supercomputer/6408.html?doc=6408

Sounds godly..?

 

[eastmen]

I dunno ,If this is legit but if it does perform well and has a very small foot print perhaps ms or another console could use this instead of increasing their cpu size greatly. It would make a great physics processor

 

[Asher]

My guess, based entirely off the content in this thread, is those are theoretical numbers and there's no local store on the "PE" like Cell's SPE LS. As a result, there's no chance in hell it'll come close to that number. This thing has memory starvation written all over it.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I think it's attaining 10 GFlops per chip from 48 PE's. That's not at all unreasonable. The high performance claims come from scalability of the processors, shoving loads onto a board. 100 on an A4 sheet. Hmm, I'm a bit unconvinced. And yes, how do they manage dataflow through all that?

Looks to me like a Cell rival to be an all-in-one solution, that's power all and any Creative devices. Thus the same software can drive their phones, media players, and soundcards, etc. Makes life easy for them. I doubt high-end performance will really manifest itself here, but then again I haven't checked out the official site so I may be missing their cunning Voodoo!

 

[Kaotik]

Zii has been discussed quite a bit over here: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=51452