Late last year, Creative launched a website and teaser campaign for a new product called Zii, with the only clue being its tagline: “Stemcell computing”. While you can argue whether or not it’s smart to focus attention on such a sensitive subject, the product that has rolled out of this campaign today is quite tantalising.
In 2002, Creative acquired 3Dlabs, a fabless chip maker that specialises in fully programmable media-rich application processors (I took that from Wikipedia, I must admit), geared towards the embedded market. Combining 3Dlabs’s expertise with 1 billion dollars of research money led to the birth of a concept the company has called stemcell computing.
As most of you will know, stemcells are cells that have not yet been assigned a job, so to speak. In other words, these cells are programmable to become any cell of the human body, and therefore, they could aid in treating, and possibly curing, several diseases and other health problems. I’m no biologist though, so I’m sure any possible biology buffs will correct me.
Creative has applied the concept of stem cells to a new processor called the ZMS-05, which consists of two ARM-926 cores, accompanied by a set of 48 programmable ‘processing elements’, which can develop in real-time into performing any of the specialised acceleration functions needed by modern computing. They claim that the Zii can playback HD content effortlessly, and can even display 3D games without any problems.
To make it all even more interesting, the Zii system-on-chips can be linked without any problems, and Creative says that they can achieve a teraflop of processing power on a computer the size of an A4 paper. They also claim Zii’s can be linked to up to petaflop levels. The demos on the Zii.com website are quite impressive – powering two high-definition displays with just that tiny soc is just plain impressive.
Creative will market the Zii platform through Zii Labs, a wholly owned subsidiary(effectively 3Dlabs renamed). They are targeted at the embedded market, such as media players, mobile phones, and navigation devices.
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?
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.
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.
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?
Heck, I thought it was a new nitendo
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?)
Hi,
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 80×86 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
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.
they should have called it the Revolution.
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…
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…
Their docs call it a SIMD arch so I don’t think you can run multiple simultaneous kernels – not on the array clusters anyway
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
.
Sounds like creative’s answer to the IBM CPU that’s in PS3’s.