What Creative can tell is that each chip is composed of two ARM cores, some other stuff and 48 fully programmable PEs(processing elements):
The latest ZMS-05 processor combines a powerful media processing array, dual ARM cores and a rich set of integrated peripheral controllers with a range of hardware platforms and advanced middleware to enable OEMs, ODMs, System Integrators and Software developers to harness their ingenuity to quicky create and market a broad range of highly innovative products.
... at the heart of the ZMS architecture is an array of media-optimized Processing Elements (PEs) that can instantly develop into any of the specialized acceleration functions required of today's media rich devices.
This description still looks like they are talking about an FPGA type device. They even pack two non-programmable ARM cores in there. The "middleware" and "software developers" words in that sentence also seem to point to something similar to the hardware description languages used in the FPGA world.
A current FPGA can be programmed with a new function really fast, like less than 10 seconds. If Creative somehow managed to cut that programming time to miliseconds, then they are on to something good here, something very useful.
Now, these programming cores are supposed to be able to churn 10GFLOPs/s, which is nothing extraordinary, worse even for an FPGA. Current Virtex designs from Xilinx are theoretically capable of 85GFLOPS/s, as this HPCWire article details. The theoretical compute performance of the Zii is, then, good for it's supposed power consumption, it's just not groundbreaking, and not even close to the peak of 205GFLOPS/s the PowerXCell 8i is capable off - mind you, these are the CPUs used in the current king of the Top500: the Roadrunner, from IBM.
VR-Zone has an article "detailing" the Zii, from which this was taken:
As I detailed, building a Zii supercomputer is not feasible, at least not in the most efficient way, because of Xilinx's Virtex series way up in performance; only a real "instantly reprogrammable" capability could make it any interesting to this market, as multiple-purpose accelerators. It wasn't disclosed how ZiiLabs have achieved this, so it's still not something up for serious consideration.
There are some interesting applications for something like the Zii and one of them is video acceleration. Imagine that Nvidia and ATI could use embedded silicon with these reprogrammable abilities for video decoding in hardware, that would be a huge leap from what we have today. Both ATI and Nvidia still use function-fixed hardware, which takes up little silicon and is very fast at doing it's job. This, in turn, only allows them to add new codecs when they spin new silicon, making it a huge hinder for fast updates. For this, the Zii has a very good potential, especially if you put it in a "netbook", or something even less performing, which isn't capable of 1080p video decoding at decent speeds.
There are still many details being left out, especially the architecture, the ZMS-05 is still a - very - obscure device.
From the type of technology that it seems to be, Creative will probably have a tough time bringing it to mass consumption: they need to line up with the right partners first. We all know the tough time Nvidia is having for people to adopt CUDA, it has taken them a huge amount of time, and money, for anyone to do anything useful with it.
The Zii can really be something different, revolutionary, but it just doesn't seem so, right now.
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