14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA's Tegra platform might soon get a worthy competitor, as ZiiLABS announced today the debut of its new ZMS-08 product, the company's 3rd-generation media-rich application processor, promising to enable 1,080p Blu-ray quality H.264 decode performance to low-power devices. The company claims that the new solution, which combines a StemCell Computing array with a 1GHz ARM Cortex processor, can deliver more than four times the performance of previous-generation devices.
“The ZMS-08 processor confirms the flexibility and scalability of our architecture and enables our customers to develop richer mobile and connected devices that are four times faster and twice as power efficient as previous solutions,” Hock Leow, president of ZiiLAB, said. “Its new capabilities such as Blu-ray quality playback, 720p simultaneous encode and decode of H.264 video, accelerated OpenGL ES 2.0 and rich peripheral integration such as dual USB controllers and HDMI are blurring the boundary between the capabilities of the traditional PC and connected device.”
Among the features that have been built inside the new chip, we will highlight the support for full HD video playback at 1,080p, in addition to support for H.264 high-profile video at 40Mbps, a feature that will enable customers to enjoy Blu-ray quality video, directly from a small-sized device. The chip also offers support for OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics, Adobe Flash 10, while the integration of the Xtreme Fidelity X-Fi audio technology is expected to deliver a premium audio quality to the devices that will be built on the new chip.
In addition to the aforementioned features, the new chip will also provide the processing power of ARM's Cortex-A8 processor, running at 1GHz and featuring 256K of L2 cache, NEON, the TrustZone security technology and 1GB of addressable RAM. To reduce device costs, the chip also comes with a number of integrated peripheral functions, such as dual USB 2.0 OTG controllers with PHY and ULPI interfaces, all within a chip that comes in a 13x13mm, 424-pin FBGA package.
Despite no words on pricing, ZiiLABS announced that the ZM-08 was sampling to certain customers at the moment and was scheduled to enter the volume-shipment stage in the first quarter of 2010.