Thursday, January 8th 2009
Zii: A Supercomputer the Size of a Postage Stamp
Zii has taken us by surprise for sure. It's not affiliated with life-science, it's certainly not a PC audio processor. It's a multi-core processor the size of a postage stamp, that its makers claim to possess raw computational power to rival that of a supercomputer. Zii stands for "Zen Two" or Z II, it is a combination of the ZMS-05 processor, a system board, middleware and an optimised OS. Soon to be announced at CES, Zii might well turn out to be Creative's most important product, even more so than SoundBlaster. VR-Zone provided some details ahead of Creative's announcement.
At the center of Zii is its ZMS-05 processor that consists of 24 fully programmable processing elements (PE). It uses two thread arbiters based on the ARM architecture, so it isn't going to run a Windows PC. The "Stem Cell" is a reference to the fact that each PE can be assigned to do a different task, or a function altogether. So Zii is inspired by stem cells and the way in which they function (diversification), not that it has anything to do with stem cells, although Creative has to explain a lot more about the Zii and address the part where, in its previous communication to us, it referred to a technology of silicon that "grows and adapts" to different needs and ecosystems, leading most to a totally different interpretation of it.
Creative claims that computational power of Zii is so concentrated, that a Zii processor with the footprint of an A4 size sheet of paper can dole out TFLOPs of computational power. Although these claims may sound big to digest, the most likely applications of Zii would go back to high-performance consumer electronics devices. It most certainly isn't going to do a "CELL" by challenging x86 and processors made by Intel, AMD and VIA, but it will certainly pose some competition to the CELL broadband engine, and NVIDIA's Tegra processor technology. While the two may be a bit diverse, with CELL being more of a high-power processing element, and Tegra being more of a mobile processing element, Zii fits into the gray-area between them. For more details, follow the VR-Zone report.
Source:
VR-Zone
Creative claims that computational power of Zii is so concentrated, that a Zii processor with the footprint of an A4 size sheet of paper can dole out TFLOPs of computational power. Although these claims may sound big to digest, the most likely applications of Zii would go back to high-performance consumer electronics devices. It most certainly isn't going to do a "CELL" by challenging x86 and processors made by Intel, AMD and VIA, but it will certainly pose some competition to the CELL broadband engine, and NVIDIA's Tegra processor technology. While the two may be a bit diverse, with CELL being more of a high-power processing element, and Tegra being more of a mobile processing element, Zii fits into the gray-area between them. For more details, follow the VR-Zone report.
26 Comments on Zii: A Supercomputer the Size of a Postage Stamp
Perhaps I'd be impressed once the confusion is gone.
:laugh:
So... it does beg the questions: When will there be sofware and hardware interface layers written to take advantage of all this power? What will it be? Why haven't they listed specific applications for this "revolutionary" processor - is it supposed to be obvious?
EDIT: on a sidenote, Creative doesnt quite have the technology to make anything entirely diverse and ultimately powerful, both AMD and INTEL are light years ahead of anything anyone else has to offer.
Its like Chrome graphics trying to compete in the high-end graphic card market, it isnt going to happen, they just don't have the technology to just jump right in and one-up what these companies have been striving towards for nearly decades.
IBM gets a great deal of their income from specialized processors. Intel and Advanced Micro Devices makes processors for larger mobile devices. ARM also makes craploads of specialized processors.
::EDIT:: The marketing image does not suit my tastes, but at least they have a good message. Don't get me wrong guys I'm only saying the
marketing aesthetic is not here for me. The message is clear. This is interesting stuff. These chips are powerful for the size.