Creative takes wraps off Zii processor architecture

Posted at: 4:23pm 8th January 2009 by Ben Hardwidge

New processor could enable small, low-power supercomputers as well as all sorts of advanced mobile goodies

Creative might have made its name with its SoundBlaster sound cards and Zen music players, but the company’s new Zii architecture could well change the whole direction of the company. Creative today announced the creation of ZiiLABS, a subsidiary of Creative that combines 3D workstation graphics company 3DLabs and Creative’s Personal Digital Element Group. The division has created the much-hyped Zii processor architecture, which Creative says is capable of processing several Petaflops.

The first product to be based on the architecture will be the ZMS-05 SoC (system-on-chip) platform. The processor is based on what Creative calls a ‘stemcell’ architecture, which appears to operate in a parallel manner similar to the stream processors found in current GPU architectures in GPGPU applications.

According to Creative, the ZMS architecture ‘uses an array of media-optimised Processing Elements (PE) as its stem cells.’ These, says Creative, ‘can instantly develop into any of the specialised acceleration functions required of today's media rich devices, which it says offers ‘advantages in terms of flexibility, performance and features when compared to the fixed function silicon blocks traditionally used in SoC (silicon-on-chip) designs.’

Creative hasn’t revealed any specific details about the processing elements yet, but it claims that they have a high ‘compute density’ that allows the ZMS-05 ‘to do an immense amount of media processing in far less time — and with far less energy — than taken by standard processors.’ One advantage of this could be increased battery life, and Creative also says that its intelligent power control system could allow features of the chip to be put into standby, but still be instantly activated several weeks later.

Another major advantage of the processor architecture, according to Creative, is its scalability. The company says that it can scale anywhere between 10 Gigaflops and several Petaflops, and the company has demonstrated this with a Teraflop Accelerator that Creative says has ‘the footprint of an A4-sized sheet of paper,’ but uses less power than the average desktop PC. Creative describes the scalability as ‘virtually unlimited’ and says that it could enable ‘a state-of-the- art ‘hypercomputer' with many Petaflops of processing power,’ which would be ‘100 times smaller, 100 times greener and 100 times lower cost than conventional super computers.’

A number of companies have already expressed an interest in the technology, including MSI. The company’s associate vice president, Steven Lee, said that ‘the market is evolving and consumers are looking for lower cost, high performance, Internet-ready devices. We are excited to be working with ZiiLABS and the ZMS-05 SoC as they offer a rich platform for just such products.’