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Despite an investment of over 10 000 man years and l$ billion of research money, Creative's latest product, the Zii, hardly inspired anyone when its true nature was revealed earlier this year. We were hoping for something like an iPod-beating MP3 player. Nevertheless, it's an interesting concept, and a very big move for Creative, which moves it away from the sound cards with which the company has become synonymous.

Creative was so excited about the Zii that it decided to merge its 3DLABS with key personnel from Creative to form ZiiLABS, a wholly-owned subsidiary revealed at the same time as the Zii chip. It's worth pointing out that Zii isn't really an entirely new concept-it's based on a 3DLABS media chip known as the ZMS-05.

Creative obviously decided the Nintendo-esque Zii was a catchier name, and the new processor is subtitled the ZMS-05.

What, exactly, is the Zii? It's touted by Creative as Stemcell computing which doesn't mean it's a freakish experiment that's able to sprout new limbs, unfortunately. The naming instead refers to the base cells that make up multi-cellular organisms, the ones that can repurpose themselves to be a bit of bone or skin if needs be.

Stemcells are actually a good analogy for the Zii. The processor is able to repurpose its processor elements (PEs) - the 24 'cells' that make up the chip - for different tasks, such as processing video, 3D graphics or sound. This differs from traditional parallel processing architecture, where the processing elements can only perform one task. In addition, each processor element is capable of switching between functions thousands of times each millisecond.

The advantage of this system, according to Creative, is that unused parts of the chip can be switched off to save electricity. In fact, Creative state that the Zii will consume 1/100th of the electricity of a supercomputer. But bearing in mind supercomputers probably require a small power station to run, that isn't saying much. We get the idea, though.

Zii Selling Point

The Zii can also be infinitely scaled upwards - if you have a million chips, they'll all work together as a single supercomputer processor. Admittedly, that'll be one humungous device, but the Zii's other selling point is its size. It's a tiny chip, and Creative is marketing it primarily for use in mobile devices. And, with motherboard and netbook supremo MSI onboard, it could be featured in any number of upcoming devices.

To demonstrate the Zii, Creative used a desktop-like PC platform with the footprint of an A4 sheet of paper. It showed how it can handle high-definition video without straining and display 3D graphics in Half-Life (ahem). The paradigm here is for the Zii to be able to output from a small mobile device, such as a smartphone, onto a high-definition 1,080p display. Which will be mightily impressive in practice.

The Zii chip includes all the codecs needed to display video and 3D graphics, as well as web pages and images. Creative hopes to put it in the hands of manufacturers, who will repurpose the chip as they see fit. The platform delivered alongside the chip includes a Linux-based operating system, the software development kit, hardware platforms and ecosystem.

What is Zii Cost?

What will make or break the Zii is its price. Creative is boasting a low cost per chip, and its energy-saving properties will be attractive to people looking to build credit-crunch-defying devices. It's all there on paper, but we're going to have to see something really impressive before we give the Zii the red carpet and full blessing.

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