Creative Zii is a nano sized supercomputer platform

Last month Creative teased us with a site to promote their upcoming Zii and today VR Zone managed to get their hands on some more information about this Stemcell Computing chip which will be the base of many future Creative products. The site says Creative invested more than $1 billion into the development of the Zii, this SoC is comprised of a processor, board, SDK , middleware, optimized OS, etc.

The Zii is a highly scalable and programmable architecture designed by the former 3DLabs group, which Creative bought in 2002. The first Zii chip will be the ZMS-05, this system-on-a-chip (SoC) features dual ARM-926 cores with 48 programmable processor elements (PEs), capable of delivering 10 gigaFLOPS of computing power.

The chip is able to re-program itself in real-time to suit the needs of the application being executed, so there's probably a software stack on top controlling the PEs.

In addition, the Zii chip has the ability to shut down unused PEs and wake them up when necessary, thus saving power. For instance, more PEs will be activated when performing intensive tasks such as playing 3D games or playing back HD videos.

The advantage of this design is unlimited scalability. Creative is claiming a Teraflop computer with the footprint of an A4 sheet, and a Petaflop super computer with 147456 ZMS chips in 576 blade servers.

The Creative Zii will have many potential markets, including cell phones, set top boxes, media players, etc. It seems to be competition for the NVIDIA Tegra and Texas Instrument DSP chips. VR Zone also unveils Creative is working on an iPhone-like device based on the Zii and says MSI is working closely with ZiiLABS on future low-cost, high-performance Internet-ready devices.