Creative Keeps Playing Vaporware With Zii

Creative's Zii Labs subsidiary releases the updated ZMS-08 chip, brings a GHz Cortex-A8 ARM core inside.

Specifications galore:

• Blu-ray Quality 1080p H.264 Video Decode
• 1080p H.264 Video Encode
• 720p H.264 Video Conferencing
• Accelerated OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0
• Xtreme Fidelity X-Fi Audio Technology
• Multi Format Media CODECs
• ARM Cortex-A8 at 1GHz
• Accelerated Graphics and Compositing
• Advanced Image Signal Processing
• Rich Peripheral Integration & Connectivity

The new ARM core is a new addition, but this is mostly marketing talk and don't get me started on the X-Fi capabilites...
As for the mysterious "Processing Elements", Zii Labs now unveils some more "details":

• High Compute Density SIMD Architecture
• 64 Processing Element Array
• 8 Clusters of 8 Processing Elements
• Utilisation of Array Scales with Workload
• Integer and IEEE 32-bit and 16-bit floats
• Offloads the CPU from Intensive Media Processing Tasks
• Fully Programmable to Support a Wide Range of Current and Future Standards
• Multi-Format Video Decode and Encode
  - Including; H.264, WMV, MPEG4, MPEG2, Adobe Flash, XVid, DivX and more...
• Image Encode and Decode
• OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 3D graphics
• Xtreme Fidelity X-Fi Audio Processing
  - Crystalizer Intelligently Restores Audio Detail Lost During File Compression
  - CMSS-3D Adds Surround Sound Experience to Headphones and Stereo Speakers
  - Up-Mix Stereo to Sound Great on Surround Sound Speaker Systems
  - Smart Volume, Dialogue Enhancer and Graphic Equalizer
  - Acoustic Echo cancellation, Microphone beam former and Noise Reduction Modules
• Advanced Image and Display Processing performed on the media array
  - Scaling, Rotation, De-interlacing, Color-space conversion, Color and Gamma correction
  

No kidding? The utilization of an SIMD array varies with workloads? My god, I never thought so! What a revolution!
Jokes aside, perhaps they mean that the arrays can be turned off to save power? That would make some sense, although very short of revolutionary.

This is ridiculous, Zii Labs mentions an array of SIMD processors, 64 total, but mentions no peak throughput, no vector width, nothing. This looks a lot like Nvidia's GPUs, they're SIMD, but with some subtle differences, especially at the hardware level: there are no vector units but an array of small processors, each with an FPUs and two ALUs.
What it seems to me is that Creative has no revolution on it's hands but instead has eight clusters of eight very small, cacheless processors. Each of these arrays can run the same instruction on what would be a 256bit width array, hence SIMD. It's not quite spectacular nor easy to program, so this seems one reason to upgrade the ARM core.
Since the ZMS-05 has 48 PEs and is claimed to perform 8GFLOPS/s, that would put the ZMS-08 somewhere around 11GFLOPS/s. That means it will be trounced by Nvidia's Tegra 2, which is expected to be a CUDA compatible device, to which there is plenty of software already(comparatively) and more FP throughput.

Now lets take a look at this picture:


It doesn't tell much, does it? It tells us more about what we already know: the details of the ARM Cortex-A8.
That an array of small processors can do all those tasks described inside the "Flexible Media Processing Array", most of us already know: it's typical for modern heteregenous architectures.
Don't be fooled, the Zii Egg may end up an interesting product but it falls (very) short of all the hype.

PS: Creative has been asked to provide more documentation on the architecture. I don't expect them to show up anytime soon but it's worth a try.