Creative’s Zii has been on our radar screen since December, and we largely ignored it since we figured it was some sort of upcoming mobile media player from Creative. But today our antennae went up; turns out, Creative’s Zii is a new System On Chip (SoC), a type of processor combining the major elements of a computer system onto a single chip.
This new Zii ZMS-05 [PDF link] processor is an ARM-based chip with so-called “Stemcell Computing” technology – that is, multiple processor elements, or PEs, which work together to perform tasks in varied configurations on the fly. Unlike traditional CPUs with pre-defined blocks performing dedicated tasks (video processing, audio processing, etc.), the Zii’s multiple PEs can be configured and reconfigured in real time to allocate as much processing power as is needed for a given task, or to be partially shut down to save power when processing demands are few.
The utility of this type of processing technology in mobile devices is clear: when demanding tasks are required from a smartphone, like video playback or 3D rendering, more PEs can be dynamically assigned to perform these tasks. When using basic, less-demanding functions, large portions of the chip can be shut off to save power.
The first Zii Processor, the ZMS-05, features a dual ARM-926 architecture with multiple PEs for a reported 10GFlops (1GFlop = 109 floating point operations per second) of processing power. This is loosely comparable to the processing power of an Intel Core 2 Duo L7200 low voltage 1.3GHz processor [Chart].
How well this technology will actually work, of course, remains to be seen. It’s also unclear how Creative and ZiiLABS plan to move forward with Zii, though we can clearly expect to see future Creative products using this technology.
There are also reports that the companies are working with OEMs in order to bring the SoC to various device types. When or if a Zii-powered mobile device – or smartphone -will emerge is unclear.