Could the Zii be an FPGA?

So, Creative is about to unveil a new chip or product, at CES: the Zii. It has been called "Stemcell computing" in marketing lingo and, as such, some things can be infered from this designation.

The first thing that comes to mind when we think about a stem cell is it's a type of cell that latter differentiates to something more specific.

The stem cell of the computing world is the FPGA, the Field-programmable Gate Array. This type of chip contains, nowadays, millions of programmable "gates"(the one pictured above has one million), basic building blocks for computer logic. You can build virtually anything in an FPGA but the ASIC(application specific integrated circuit) is what's used for the typical graphic card or processor is due to the lower cost to produce in high volume.
The modern FPGAs aren't fully programmable: they're a hybrid. They contain not just gates but more specific logic like SRAMs, lookup-tables and even one or two microprocessors, sometimes. This way a large amount of it's logic goes unused, since much of it can't be mapped, while an ASIC is built with mostly 100% of it's logic for use, other than redundancy stuff.

FPGAs can be used for fast integrated circuit prototyping, or deployment, since they can be programmed multiple times, frequently at runtime, changing architecture as pleased. They can be used to implement things like network controllers, switchs, simple RISC processors or a specific, highly efficient co-processor. You just need to code/describe it.

Currently FPGAs have been able to support millions of programmable gates in one chip, opening them up to new applications previously made impossible. It's still a far cry from the billions of transistors that ASICs currently have but in Creative's market there isn't a need for such complex chips. The X-Fi "only" has 51 million transistors - a paltry number when compared to Nvidia's GTX 2xx 1.4 billion transistors - but still out of reach for pratical FPGA applications.

What Creative might be introducing then is an hybrid design, already similar to current FPGA designs, that they may somehow reuse for multiple product lines or even upgrade with new "hardware" features along the life of the product. I wouldn't expect an upgradable product, given Creative's recent inability to supply updated drivers to Audigy owners, let alone new "hardware" features - still, all is possible.

The official announced should come in the next few days, from Las Vegas.
In the meantime, visit the products website, if you haven't already - although there's not much to see.