Creative has unveiled its Zii StemCell computing platform and although it turned up to be slightly less revolutionary than Creative tried to make it sound like, it's still a very interesting solution for multimedia centric devices.

The core of it all is the ZMS-05 SoC (System on a Chip) or Media-Rich Application Processor as Creative likes to call it which is based on the 3Dlabs DMS-02 media processor. The two shares a similar design, but the DMS-02 is a much simpler chip that lacks much of the functionality of the ZMS-05

The ZMS-05 features a pair of ARM 926EJ-S cores, however, these aren't the most interesting parts of the ZMS-05. What Creative has added to the ARM processors is what they call a media processing array which consists of 24 processing elements. Now if you're following the development in the graphics card industry, this will look very similar to a modern graphics card design in many ways.

Creative is using a SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) design for the media processing part, similar to that found in PC processors. This allows the two CPU cores to have specific tasks, in this case media intensive ones, to be offloaded on to the media processing array. This should allow for improved video playback compared to a device using only a pair of ARM processors.

The ZMS-05 can encode and decode 720p video and it can also output 1080p via an integrated analog TV encoder. A wide range of formats are supported such as H.264, MPEG 1/2/4, WMV and VC-1 among others. In terms of audio formats, MP3, AAC, WMA, AAC and Ogg Vorbis is supported, but there's no mention of FLAC, although we have a feeling this could be implemented as well. Creative claims that the ZMS-05 can play back an 8mbps bitstream MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 HD video at 30 fps which should allow it to handle most other formats quite easily.

The ZMS-05 also supports OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 3D accelerated graphics and of course 2D graphics acceleration. As the ZMS-05 is a SoC it also supports a wide range of I/O options such as SDIO, USB 2.0 OTG, S/PDIF, IDE, Ethernet and a wide range of other options. Oddly enough SATA support is lacking which is a bit of a shame, but with most digital media players going down the flash memory route, support for NAND and NOR flash memory is most likely more important for the intended usage model.

The ZMS-05 is intended to be used for portable media players, MIDs, PND's (GPS navigation devices), Smartphones and PDAs (does anyone still use a PDA?) and a wide range of other applications. It's impossible to cover all of the details here, but if you're interested in reading up on all the little details we suggest you head over to the ZiiLABS website and read through all the detailed documentation there.

The good news is that Creative already has a range of development platforms ready for its customers. This should hopefully allow for quick and easy product development so we won't have to wait until next years CES to see the first Zii powered devices. The main development platform comes with 128MB of DDR memory, 32MB NOR flash (for the OS) as well as some other features fitted to a SoM (System-on-Module) board and this can in turn be attached to an I/O board. The I/O board houses 4GB of NAND flash, a 4.3in touch screen with 800x480 resolution, HDMI output up to 1080p, an Ethernet port, 802.11b/g WiFi, an SD card slot, an IDE interface for a hard drive and a wide range of other connectivity options.

For the full lowdown, head over to the ZiiLABS website which you can find here and you can also find a PDF with details about the ZMS-05 here and the development board here

Here are some pictures of various development modules