14 DAY TRIAL // Back in late 2008, Creative put up a teaser site regarding a new product, which the company would announce in the near future. As with most teasers, the site provided little to no indication as to what the purpose of the new product would become or when the company would decide to announce it. However, it appears that a series of new details have surfaced, revealing more about what Creative is planning on bringing.
As it turns out, Zii is not another audio product, but rather a new chip that comes with a System-on-Chip design, consisting of a processor, board, SDK, Middleware, Optimized OS etc. The SoC's name comes from ZEN II or the ZEN second generation and has nothing to do with another successful product that comes with a title that is similar to that of Creative's latest.
According to details on a recent news-article on vr-zone, Zii is claimed to be a supercomputer in a nano size. It is the fruit of a US$1bn investment on the part of its company, which is likely to use it for some of its upcoming products. The new SoC is also said to be the result of Creative's buyout of 3DLabs, back in 2002. Back then, Creative was said to be pursuing 3DLab's research in its next-generation graphics architecture, which is said to be highly scalable and programmable.
The new processor from Creative has been dubbed ZMS-05 SoC and has a dual ARM-926 architecture, providing 48 programmable processor elements (PE) capable of 10GFlops of processing power. Also, the chip is capable of re-programming itself in real time to suit the requirements of the application being executed, which could mean that there's probably some software involved in the processor itself. Moreover, the Zii chip has been designed in such a way that it can shut down unused PEs and then turn them on when required. This ability will enable it to save power while it isn't used at its full potential.
There are many advantages to the Zii chip, which could bring the company a much awaited success rate. Given the scalability possibilities of the chip, it could possibly end up in some upcoming mobile phones, handhelds, set top boxes, media players and others. The company is already at work and collaborating with various OEM partners, including MSI, in order to bring out products that will take advantage of the aforementioned SoC. There are also reports of the company working on an iPhone-like device, based on the technical advantages provided by its new SoC.