OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/20749/Creative_Launches_Zii_Stemcell_Computing_Platform Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Sun, 29 Nov 2009 22:24:31 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com Terrible name? http://osnews.com/thread?342932 http://osnews.com/thread?342932 Why did they call it StemCell Computing if, according to the meagre info in the press release, it's not in any way related to human stem cells? Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (noamsml) Comments Not a supercomputer, and not headed to a PC near you http://osnews.com/thread?342935 http://osnews.com/thread?342935 So it's a dual-core ARM processor with a very powerful (and interesting) graphics card that is not really explained in any materials I can find. On the plus side the clock speed suggests they've got power under control (max 266MHz), but they don't quote watts and general-purpose FLOP numbers. The address space is only 1GB, which is a questionable decision when the world is moving to 64-bit to get more than 4GB. Some of the media processor materials quote the figure of 100GFlops (for the media unit only?), which isn't supercomputer power, really.

Too little information is given to know whether this is something to be excited about or just another lark. Fri, 09 Jan 2009 23:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (noamsml) Comments RE: Terrible name? http://osnews.com/thread?342939 http://osnews.com/thread?342939 They explained the name in the press release. A stem cell is a non-specialised cell that can become any other type of cell. The stemcell processor is a generalist processor that can do many tasks. Fri, 09 Jan 2009 23:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (unclefester) Comments RE: Not a supercomputer, and not headed to a PC near yo http://osnews.com/thread?342940 http://osnews.com/thread?342940
So it's a dual-core ARM processor with a very powerful (and interesting) graphics card that is not really explained in any materials I can find.


There is no graphics card.

It's got a dualcore ARM processor accompanied by 48 programmable processing engines that are capable of switching - in real-time - towards performing specific acceleration tasks.

This processor does all the work you see in the demonstration videos, linked to in the "read more" section. Fri, 09 Jan 2009 23:36:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom_Holwerda) Comments RE: Terrible name? http://osnews.com/thread?342941 http://osnews.com/thread?342941 now they didn't call it human, did they? And the only reason you only hear about human stem cells in the media is because those are relevant to human medicine, of course. Most organisms will have stem cells. And so they called it that because it can adopt any function, much like any stem cell - not so far fetched, is it? Fri, 09 Jan 2009 23:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Googol) Comments videos were amusing http://osnews.com/thread?342946 http://osnews.com/thread?342946 arg.. The speaker in those demo videos is so utterly snide and stuffed to the brim with hyberbole.

I'll believe it when I see real world benchmarks,numbers and not pretty presentations.

The gains they show in zii vs conventional processors just don't seem possible these days. It might provide (significant) gains but certainly not the levels they seem to imply.

I did think it was pretty neat that they used Big Buck Bunny in one of the videos Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (_txf_) Comments Comment by merkoth http://osnews.com/thread?342950 http://osnews.com/thread?342950 Seems interesting. Keeping obvious differences aside, it kinda reminds me of the Cell processor: A central unit and a bunch of less powerful side processing units.

I'd love to have one (or a few) of these in something similar to the BeagleBoard. Sat, 10 Jan 2009 03:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (merkoth) Comments Stem cells aren't "sensitive" http://osnews.com/thread?342952 http://osnews.com/thread?342952 Thom, stem cells per se are not generally a sensitive subject. Adult stem cells, for example, generally raise no ethical hassles; nor do stem cells obtained from a placenta, or from umbilical cord blood.

What is a sensitive subject is embryonic stem cells, since some people object to the killing of a human embryo to obtain them. Sat, 10 Jan 2009 03:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (jack_perry) Comments Transmeta http://osnews.com/thread?342953 http://osnews.com/thread?342953 How does this idea of a programmable processing unit differ from Transmeta's Big Thing? (which incidentally seems to have fallen completely off the radar--what happened to them anyway?) Sat, 10 Jan 2009 03:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (jack_perry) Comments RE: Terrible name? http://osnews.com/thread?342960 http://osnews.com/thread?342960 Heck, I thought it was a new nitendo ;) Sat, 10 Jan 2009 07:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (jeanmarc) Comments RE: Transmeta http://osnews.com/thread?342969 http://osnews.com/thread?342969 Hi,

How does this idea of a programmable processing unit differ from Transmeta's Big Thing? (which incidentally seems to have fallen completely off the radar--what happened to them anyway?)


Transmeta died, or more correctly, in 2005 they restructured and became a corporation that licenses low power semiconductor intellectual property.

Their processors used something like JIT, where in theory it'd be possible to replace the CPU's JIT compiler with a JIT compiler for a different instruction set (but in practice there was never enough documentation to allow anyone to do this, and from what I've heard the CPU's native micro-ops were so close to 80x86 that other instruction sets weren't practical). Of course "something like JIT" may be an exaggeration, and it may have been something more like replaceable microcode.

I'm not too sure how Creative's 'processing elements' work - they sounds like FPGAs to me.

-Brendan Sat, 10 Jan 2009 09:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Brendan) Comments =! stem cell http://osnews.com/thread?342971 http://osnews.com/thread?342971 A real stemcell, once specialized into another cell, can never turn back or become another cell.

This "stemcell" electronics can be re-programmed, and as such are not stemcells but completely adaptive cells (which don't exist in the human body).

So it's only marketing speak. And who knows what else of their story is marketing speak. Sat, 10 Jan 2009 10:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (evert) Comments RE: Comment by merkoth http://osnews.com/thread?342983 http://osnews.com/thread?342983 That's exactly what I was thinking while watching the video on zii.com. Not only the architechture, but the use cases (image processing, HD video and 3D graphics) look exactly like those for which Sony and Toshiba are pitching the Cell.

The main difference seems to be that the Zii targets portable devices whereas the Cell to my knowledge does not.Edited 2009-01-10 14:37 UTC Sat, 10 Jan 2009 14:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Moochman) Comments RE: Comment by merkoth http://osnews.com/thread?342989 http://osnews.com/thread?342989 The first thing that came to my mind was Be's original prototypes for the BeBox, which used multiple AT&T Hobbit CPUs in much the same way. Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:15:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (StephenBeDoper) Comments Lame name... http://osnews.com/thread?343002 http://osnews.com/thread?343002 they should have called it the Revolution. Sat, 10 Jan 2009 19:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (milatchi) Comments C-One? http://osnews.com/thread?343006 http://osnews.com/thread?343006 Reminds me somehow on the C-One-thing - reconfigureable computing. When I talked with Jeri Ellsworth some years ago, she gave me the impression that reconfigureable computing is the thing of the next computer revolution.
Unfortunately she left Jens alone on the C-One project... Sat, 10 Jan 2009 21:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (-ujb-) Comments Basically a Cell variant http://osnews.com/thread?343010 http://osnews.com/thread?343010 After reading through some of the documentation, this is very much like a Cell processor, with some important differences.
The 2 ARM chips are 32-bit only: One runs the OS, the other is an application co-processor, whatever that means. While they hype the 24 media processing elements,
their docs clearly state that it's 3 arrays of 8, where each element of an array runs the same code.
This gives it a very strong Cell-like arch when compared to the PPE with multiple SPEs that the Cell employs.
Also, each Zii array cluster has its own DMA controller.

With only a 1 GB address space, its not taking over the desktop or the console but with the listed capabilities, we could be looking at some very cool and powerful toys. Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (bannor99) Comments Interesting indeed http://osnews.com/thread?343012 http://osnews.com/thread?343012 Linked web site is interesting... but full of marketing and not much technical details.

Other thing got my attention, they used Big Buck Bunny movie fragments ;) . Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (kajaman) Comments RE: Basically a Cell variant http://osnews.com/thread?343014 http://osnews.com/thread?343014
After reading through some of the documentation, this is very much like a Cell processor, with some important differences.
The 2 ARM chips are 32-bit only: One runs the OS, the other is an application co-processor, whatever that means. While they hype the 24 media processing elements,
their docs clearly state that it's 3 arrays of 8, where each element of an array runs the same code.
This gives it a very strong Cell-like arch when compared to the PPE with multiple SPEs that the Cell employs.
Also, each Zii array cluster has its own DMA controller.

With only a 1 GB address space, its not taking over the desktop or the console but with the listed capabilities, we could be looking at some very cool and powerful toys.


To me it look a bit more like the SIMT (Single Instruction Multiple Threads) model nVIDIA introduced with CUDA, just that you can have up to three kernels executing at the same time, but I have not delved much into the Zii's architecture, but just reading off your comments and others... Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Panajev) Comments RE[2]: Basically a Cell variant http://osnews.com/thread?343015 http://osnews.com/thread?343015


To me it look a bit more like the SIMT (Single Instruction Multiple Threads) model nVIDIA introduced with CUDA, just that you can have up to three kernels executing at the same time, but I have not delved much into the Zii's architecture, but just reading off your comments and others...


Their docs call it a SIMD arch so I don't think you can run multiple simultaneous kernels - not on the array clusters anyway Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (bannor99) Comments RE[2]: Terrible name? http://osnews.com/thread?343149 http://osnews.com/thread?343149
The stemcell processor is a generalist processor that can do many tasks.


Uh, just like X86 and most popular processors we have now?
Come on, calling it Stemcell is just a PR stunt. A rather clever one, you might say, but a stunt none the less. Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Soulbender) Comments same as PS3 cpu? http://osnews.com/thread?343175 http://osnews.com/thread?343175 Sounds like creative's answer to the IBM CPU that's in PS3's. Mon, 12 Jan 2009 19:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (RRepster) Comments