Zii has been puzzling people around the web ever since Creative launched the Zii.com website a few weeks ago. It has been stated that Zii will become one of the most important products in Creative history, it even dates back to the acquisition of 3DLabs back in 2002. VR-Zone reports that today Creative will announce the formation of Zii Labs, consisting of former 3DLabs and Creative Labs personnel and the first product to come therefrom, ZMS-05 SoC (System-on-a-chip).
ZMS-05 comes with two ARM-926 cores with 48 programmable processor elements boosting performance of up to 10GFLOPS. The chip is highly flexible and can reprogram itself in realtime says the source. Unused processor elements can be turned off to save power and reactivated when the load increases, e.g. watching high definition video or rendering 3D objects.
This design enables unlimited scalability and could result in Teraflop computing on the size of an A4 sheet of paper, or Petaflop performance from 576 blade servers using 147456 Zii chips, which is evidently short for Zen II. But unlike Zen, Zii is not only a mobile media player product, but a chip that could be used with pretty much any multimedia product; mobile phones, set-top boxes, media players, add-in cards of various sorts, video cams, and much more.
Apparently SDKs will become available today and many OEM partners are expected to announce products based on Zii in the close future, MSI is mentioned among others. The reports also mentions an iPhone-like device, which could very well ”just” be an advanced media player with a touchscreen interface. We will have to wait and see what Creative will unveil at CES.
