Creative Labs announced their Zii system on a chip processor about six months ago. The chip was designed by their ZiiLABS subsidiary and sports a pair of ARM processing cores strapped to some 3DLabs graphics wizardry for a chip that should be at home in just about any modern portable gadget.

Of course the first device comes in the form of a personal media player named Creative Zii, which is undergoing testing by the FCC, has been uncovered.

The Zii sports a touch screen interface, bluetooth and WiFi support, and will likely support a wide number of media file types to playback. As for a release date? Your guess is as good as any.

Source: epiZENter

Creative Labs has had a successful run as an audio DSP making/3D audio standard producing company, now they’re expanding their portfolio of products with the Zii system on a chip. Creative’s PR team has the skinny on the chip that just might power your next portable media player. Here’s a peek:

Incredible Scalability
The scalability of the
ZMS architecture is highlighted in the first Teraflop Accelerator with
the footprint of an A4-sized sheet of paper, consuming less power than
a desktop PC. By utilising the virtually unlimited chaining capability
of the ZMS chips, a state-of-the- art ‘hypercomputer’ with many
Petaflops of processing power can be realised, which can be 100 times
smaller, 100 times greener and 100 times lower cost than conventional
super computers.

High Energy Efficiency
Due to the compute
density of each Processing Element, the ZMS-05 SoC is able to do an
immense amount of media processing in far less time - and with far less
energy – than taken by standard processors; which translates into
longer battery life. Intelligent power control means the speed and
power consumption of the processor can be matched to the task in hand
and unused features can be turned off completely, put in deep stand-by
and reactivated instantly after weeks of shut down, helping to lengthen
battery life even further.

Complete Zii Platform Solutions
The ZMS-05
processor combines the media processing array, dual ARM cores and a
rich set of integrated peripheral controllers with hardware platforms
and advanced SDK and middleware. This will enable Software Developers,
OEMs, ODMs and System Integrators to create unlimited possibilities and
develop a broad range of highly innovative products.

At least you won’t have to deal with their driver woes…right?

Creative Labs makes some of the most poweful sound cards in the business which has garnered them quite a following. Their only drawback is their absolutely horrid driver support, especially under Linux. That’s set to change given that the company has, shockingly, open-sourced their X-Fi sound card’s Linux driver. Phoronix has the details:

Creative’s latest attempt at delivering a reliable binary driver was in April when they tried again by releasing a new beta driver. A year after they released their first binary Linux driver, the state of Creative X-Fi on Linux was a horrific mess. Following that, a Novell developer then began porting the Open Sound System X-Fi driver to ALSA, but it wasn’t in the best shape possible and the developer didn’t even have any X-Fi hardware.

Creative’s X-Fi on Linux has been far from a pleasant experience, but today that may begin to change. As a move that could be interpreted as either Creative Labs throwing in the towel or them simply acknowledging they want to play with the Linux and open-source communities nicely, they have announced the release of the source-code to their binary driver. This driver is a little less than 13,000 lines and all of it has been put under the GNU GPLv2 license.

This should go a long way towards to righting the X-Fi Linux support issues.