ZiiLabs, who is owned by Creative, known for making products that are targeted at the computer audio market, along with a handful of MP3 players, has announced two new processors today. The ZMS-20 and ZMS-40 both clock in at 1.5 GHz, with the later being a quad core chip and the former being dual core. What kind of cores are we talking about? None other than the ARM Cortex A9, the same processing core seen in NVIDIA’s Tegra 2, Apple’s A5, Samsung’s Exynos 4210 (think Galaxy S II), and Texas Instrument’s OMAP 4 series. Other features include: 1080p video playback at 30 frames per second, H.264, VC1, VP8, and Adobe Flash 10 are hardware accelerated, OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenCL 1.1 support, HDMI 1.4 output, with 3D too, the ability to handle up to 1 GB of both DDR2/3 and LPDDR2, enabling hardware vendors to optimize for either cost or speed, and a whole bunch of other technical stuff that doesn’t really matter because the likelihood of you owning something with a ZiiLabs chip inside is slim and none.
While the engineers at ZiiLabs may have gone out of their way to manufacture these two chips, and the previous generations that came before it, we’re not aware of any piece of consumer electronics out on the market that actually utilizes ZiiLabs hardware. Sure, there’s Creative’s tablets, but you’d expect Creative to have ZiiLabs silicon inside since they own them. Every Android tablet that’s on the market or will be hitting the market over the next few months uses the NVIDIA Tegra 2. That’s not due to change for a while, and when it does it’s going to be the new quad core Tegra 3 going inside.
Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Marvell, ST-Ericsson, they’re not shaking in their boots because of the ZMS-20 and ZMS-40, and we seriously wish that ZiiLabs, and Creative in general, gets bought out by someone who can actually put their expertise to good use.