ZiiLABS, a pioneering media processor and platforms company (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Creative Technology Ltd), today unveiled its ground-breaking 100-core ZMS-40 StemCell Media processor optimized for Android. The ZMS-40 combines 96 of ZiiLABS' StemCell media processing cores with four 1.5GHz ARM Cortex-A9 CPUs to deliver stunning multi-tasking application and media processing performance.

By doubling the number of StemCell Media processors compared to the previous ZMS-20, the ZMS-40 delivers twice the peak media performance, while running the larger array at lower clock speeds to achieve the same performance leads to greater energy efficiency and a reduction in power consumption of up to 50 percent. With 2X the performance and 2X the power efficiency, the ZMS-40 delivers ground-breaking media capabilities to handheld devices such as tablets, including ultra-high-resolution H.264 HP decoding of up to 3840x1080 for true 1080p 3D stereo, a rich and interactive desktop browsing experience, 2560x1600 (WQXGA) display resolution support, higher-quality video encoding and immersive OpenGL ES graphics and future support for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC).

Creative Technology Ltd. today announced the Creative ZiiSound T6 - the latest addition to its extensive Pure Wireless speaker family. The all new speaker system assumes the position of the flagship Surround Sound wireless speaker in the Pure Wireless speaker range.

The ZiiSound T6 personifies everything the Pure Wireless speaker range is, where speakers have been engineered for wireless audio perfection, based on Creative's in-house wireless technology reference system - an engineering optimisation that brings out the best wireless audio performance in Bluetooth and apt-X technologies for speakers.

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.

Late December last year, Creative started a teaser website for the company's "new direction", the Zii. Back then it was courteous enough to give us a clue about what it was about and how big a deal it was, with its rather bold tag-line "Everything you know is about to change". Today Creative dispatched emails to all those who registered for updates on the website, revealing a lot more about Zii, and we can tell from what's given, that Creative has embarked upon something big, which makes its digital audio product lineup look irrelevant to the matter.

The Zii, according to Creative, is inspired from nature's building block of life, the stem cell. A stem cell is a basic cellular unit found in multi-cellular organisms that holds the potential to divide and differentiate into the many different kinds of cells an life-forms have. Here's a revelation: Creative claims to have devised a stem cell-like silicon that can "grow and multiply into different solutions and eco-systems", it can be seen as something parallel to the process in which life functions, only that it's going to be silicon doing it. Creative goes on to add "With an investment that spans over 10 years, over a billion dollars and over 10,000 man-years, the world is poised to experience a breakthrough that will better lives beyond our imagination." Given the state the world economy is in, Creative states that the technology is recession-friendly and will in-turn unlock countless business opportunities based around the technology and its expansion. Creative will be throwing a lot more things out of the box at the upcoming CES event. The Matrix era of artificial life is beginning not to sound too much of an imagination.

Known for decades as a company that specialises in digital entertainment products, Creative is up to something new. The company is working on what it calls "Stemcell Computing". It is reportedly making a processing chip or architecture called Zii. A teaser micro-site of the same has been launched. The Zii processing chip is expected to give Creative the new direction the company has been striving for, with announcements of products incorporating the Stemcell Computing technology being expected at the upcoming CES event. Not much is known about Creative's plans at this point in time. The teaser goes with the tag-line "Everything you know is about to change", so we are expecting something big, or significant at least.