Wednesday 11 May 2011

ZiiLabs launches 48core processor for Android3.0 tablets

ZMS-20 Combines 48 Stemcell Media Processing Cores and two 1.5GHz ARM Cortex-A9
By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

ZiiLABS, the chip subsidiary of Creative Technology, has launched two multicore processors aimed at tablets running the Android3.0 operating system.
The ZMS-20 has two 1.5GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processors and ZMS-40 has four, but also have 48 and 96 media processing cores. This gives 1080p high profile video playback, immersive OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics, HD video calling and a rich desktop browsing experience including Adobe Flash Player.
This level of performance is also opening up video conferencing, text-to-speech and voice recognition applications on tablets.
"The ZMS-20 was specifically engineered to meet the performance and power efficiency requirements of high-resolution Android tablets more effectively than any other processor on the market," said Hock Leow, President of ZiiLABS. "The ZMS-08 established our leadership position for High Profile H.264 playback and the ZMS-20 takes that to the next level by adding dual ARM Cortex-A9 cores plus a host of new features such as DDR3 and LPDDR2 support, HDMI 1.4 and OpenCL."
"We are targeting this family of ZMS-20 and the ZMS-40 Zii Stemcell media processors dead-on the explosive tablet computing market. The competitively priced ZMS-20, and the ZMS-40 with its quad Cortex-A9 cores will herald a new generation of low-cost, low-power yet high-performance tablets, mobile thin clients for cloud computing and other embedded appliances for the post-PC era," said Sim Wong Hoo, Chairman and CEO of Creative Technology.
"The design and development of ZMS-40 is done, we will unleash it to ride on the up and coming new wave of tablet computing revolution. The scalable ZMS-40 will lead the way to show the world that tablet computing can be truly effective and without any compromise. With the ZMS-40, we will be able to bring the performances of tablets or other handheld devices to rival notebooks and even desktop PCs," said Sim.
"As consumer demand for smarter connected devices increases, so does the industry’s requirement for low-power, high performance semiconductor solutions," commented Eric Schorn, Vice President Marketing, Processor Division, ARM. "The combination of Cortex-A9 processors incorporating ARM NEON and TrustZone technologies provides the multicore technology to drive the latest Android tablets and ensure a high-quality user experience."
Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) tablets and associated design-kits based on the ZMS-20 will be shown in Taipei, Taiwan between 31 May and 4 June at the Computex 2011 tradeshow.
Key Features
  • Dual 1.5GHz ARM Cortex A9 cores with Neon
  • ZiiLABS flexible Stemcell media processing capabilities
  • Low-energy SIMD architecture for high performance media acceleration
  • 48 x 32-bit floating point media processing cores for 26GFlops of compute
  • High Profile H.264 video playback at 1080p@30fps
  • Wide range of accelerated video codecs including H.264, VC1 and VP8
  • High Definition, low latency video conferencing
  • Optimised OpenGL ES 2.0 for robust 3D graphics acceleration and application compatibility
  • Accelerated OpenCL 1.1 (desktop profile) integrated into Android NDK
  • High Dynamic Range (HDR) Image Processing
  • High-quality Text-to-Speech and Voice Recognition
  • 150 MPixel/sec image processing
  • Adobe Flash 10 acceleration
  • Integrated HDM1 1.4 with 3D stereo support
  • 1GB addressable memory
  • DDR2/3 at 533 MHz for low-cost
  • LPDDR2 for maximum memory bandwidth and low-power
  • 64-bit wide memory bus
  • Quad independent video controllers supporting 24-bit displays and cameras
  • 3V3 and 1V8 I/O’s reduce peripheral power consumption
  • Dual USB 2.0 HS OTG (Host/Peripheral) controllers with PHY for low system cost
  • Three independent SDIO/MMC controllers
  • Extended battery life with robust Dynamic Power Management and Instantaneous On
  • Xtreme Fidelity X-Fi audio effects
  • Enhanced Security: 256-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) and TrustZone
Availability

The ZMS-20 is sampling now to select customers and is scheduled for volume shipment to customers in the 3rd quarter of 2011. Detailed specifications of the ZMS-40 will be announced later.
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