Where's the Zii?

Zii, a recap with 6 months passed.

Upon the press release of Zii marketing stuff, I speculated that the chip might be some kind of souped up FPGA, a programmable hardware processor of some sort. This could mean the chip would be able to have dedicated, re-programmable hardware for everything from H.264 or VC-1 video acceleration to other kinds of applications like sound processors. Video acceleration is mostly out of the ball game for the desktop space since even integrated graphics started bringing dedicated hardware inside.

Creative, or should I say Zii Labs, continues to be very secretive about what is inside the said chip, leading me to the conclusion that the device may indeed be some kind of FPGA for which it would be hard to find a purpose than doesn't fit FPGAs already. Most of them are used in rapid hardware design prototyping, industrial applications and some have even directly programmed scientific computational codes for use in high performance computing. No one has been able to find a consumer application for it, aside from things like Gigabyte's iRAM - expensive, limited production parts.

Creative has been contacted for comment but have yet to issue any statement about the hardware innards of the ZMS-05 chip - not even a hint of what's so wonderful about the device - providing only marketing information of little or no use. Also, not even one consumer device has been announced that has the ZMS-05 chip inside - much less a 1 peta FLOP cluster, as touted before.