Nintendo Wi... I mean, Creative Zii

So ignoring the entire marketing stem-cell crap, this looks like a somewhat interesting chip. I have no clue why they have any supercomputer slides - other than more marketing crap (there's no way something like this could remotely scale). They really just need to say what it is and market it as that, without a pile of fluff around it.

In reality it's just a standard ARM SoC targeted at cell phones, GPSs, and other embedded devices. I don't think they've released enough specs to really compare the chip, but it falls in line with the rest of the market:
Texas Instruments: OMAP 3 is ARM Cortex A8 + PowerVR SGX graphics + all the I/O, display, etc (this is what's in the Palm Pre)
Nvidia: Tegra is ARM11 MP core + NV graphics + all the I/O, display, etc
Creative: Zii is ARM-926 core + 3dLabs graphics ("processing elements") + all the I/O, display, etc

It's interesting that all 3 are ARM, but use different cores (I really don't know enough about ARM's different families to know the tradeoffs between them). It'll interesting to see what design wins the 3 different families end up getting, since they are inherently so similar.

 

Data Spec sheet is up:
http://www.zii.com/resource/zms/DMS05-PB-23DEC08.pdf

 

Read the thred before posting, please:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWP3Fo98iok
After 1:10 there is real time raytracing going on...so it scales quite well...

 

I hadn't watched that video but it is quite intriguing. My question is how on earth does that thing work? It looks like 2 boards each with a solid mesh of about 9x7 chips. Umm, where's the memory? How do you get data into/out of the mesh (and to/from the chip in the middle of it) without saturating the network? What on earth is the programming model?

I'm genuinely surprised that they're pretending to go down this path since there's no way it would be practical. They claim 8 GFLOPs / chip, so the box is about 8*9*7*2=1,008GFLOPS. A single chip GTX285 is ~1,000 GFLOPs. So you have an entire box of chips (with 500 useless usb ports and 375 useless display ports) vs a single PCIe card. It's an interesting (and expensive) press stunt, but nothing more.

Again this looks like a very interesting embedded chip for exactly the applications they list on their datasheet: PMPs, MIDs, navigation, PDA/phone, etc. They really need to drop the rest of the marketing crap (stem cell / super computer / etc). They're never going to sell a box full of these chips, this demo's not going to get them any embedded system design wins, and it just makes the look ridiculous.

 

Yeah, that teraflop prototype with the blinking lights was kinda cool.

 

Their teaser site makes fun of supercomputers (specifically the Roadrunner) anyways so I doubt they're looking for that market by burning bridges.

 

fluff > spec in that data sheet

 

Funny marketing, but I think the technology is incredible. I would be very interested to see where they eventually take this chipset.

I remember Sony speaking about the idea of "Micro-Cell" processors in the future, this reminded me a lot of that.

 

I had a news piece in the works, but I canned it because it was just too negative and pointless. What's incredible, however, is that this data sheet is less interesting than I thought it was! Sigh, ah well... I guess given the budget they likely had (not $1B; more like $1K I'm sure! ) it's not too bad for sure.

 

How on earth can they cram 256 Zii chips on one blade board? Seems like Zii needs zero surrounding logic to be operational and only surface area of the board is restrictive element for putting more Ziis on board! :O Zii does not need memory?

Now, if this would be true then we're at the edge of the revolution... but somehow I feel we are not!

 

Oh, come on, it doesn't need to be functional! It only needs to be able to run tiny little operations that fit in the ARM's cache. Obviously 32-bit floats only.

http://crd.lbl.gov/~dhbailey/dhbpapers/twelve-ways.pdf

 

Thanks for this! I had never read it before and it's very entertaining. (And, as someone working in the field, it is a bit scary how much of it is still perfectly applicable 18 years (!) later)

As for the Zii, it seems like a nice architecture for embedded systems, but I'd rather fill my supercomputer with GPUs.

 

Love it.

 

I could see this work on their own soundcard line (which will bring a boost to the Creative X-FI name) as well as their PMP/MP3 player lineup (which could possibly bring them to the top three in that market along with Apple and Sony)

It should give their products a boost if they play their cards right.

 

The consequence of not having much in the way of dedicated hardware for 3D graphics is specs like its 42M texels/second fillrate.

The ZMS-05's handling of compressed textures and other texture operations would be interesting to know with its claimed support for the OpenGL ESs.

 

Thanks!
I'll echo PeterT and say that it's a bit scary how perfectly relevant this is 18 years down the line.

 

Ah, so that's where NVIDIA got its inspiration from when comparing GPU PhysX with their craptastic CPU implementation!

 

Looks like just another FPGA with some fancy power saving tech and maybe less periphery required. Meh.

 

And thats where most GPGPU papers get their inspiration from when they compare only 32-bit FP performance against single core non-optimized CPU code.