Read on for the official press release.

Update: The Zii.com website is not up yet. I’m guessing it will be up by tomorrow morning

Creative Forms ZiiLABS and Ushers in the Era of StemCell Computing™ Where
Nano-Sized Super Computing Will Be Available in Our Daily Lives through
Flexible, Tiny, Powerful and Scalable SoC

SINGAPORE – 8 January 2009 – Creative Technology Ltd. today announced the formation of
ZiiLABS (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Creative), with the combination of 3DLABS — which
has a 25-year history as a leading innovator in programmable graphics, media and applications
processing — and resources drawn from the largest product group in Creative, the Personal
Digital Entertainment group.

The formation of ZiiLABS, the launch of the new ZiiLABS ZMS-05 SoC (System-On-Chip) and
the new Zii™ Platform today usher in the new era of StemCell Computing™. The new ZiiLABS
ZMS-05 SoC (System-On-Chip) will be unveiled and demonstrated from 8-11 January 2009 at
the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in the Creative exhibit #30651 in the South Hall of
the Las Vegas Convention Center.

“We have invested a billion dollars and 10,000 man years of R&D effort over the last 25 years in
platform solutions,” said Sim Wong Hoo, Chairman and CEO of Creative Technology Ltd. “The
combination of the technology from 3DLABS and the product development prowess of our
Personal Digital Entertainment group delivers a complete, powerful and energy efficient
platform with a very rapid time-to-market for our partners – the Zii Platform.”

“We now look to shaping the future of computing with the introduction of the integrated ZMS-
05 media-rich processor, and ushering in the new era of StemCell Computing where we will
bring the incredible benefits of nano-sized super computing right into our daily lives,” said Hock
Leow, President of ZiiLABS.

This StemCell approach has benefits in terms of:

• Flexibility — Utilising a breakthrough technology comprising of programmable Processing Elements (PEs) which are basically Software Defined Silicon
• Scalability — 10Gigaflops to Petaflops (1015 floating point operation per second)
• Energy Efficiency — Huge processing power of the ZMS-05 SoC enables it to perform more in less time, equating to low power consumption
• Complete Solution — Ready-for-Market Zii Platform Solutions Unlimited Flexibility

Stem cells are the basic building blocks of life, possessing the unique ability to develop into the
specialised cells and tissues required by organisms to function effectively. Inspired by this
concept, the ZMS architecture uses an array of media-optimised Processing Elements (PE) as its
stem cells that can instantly develop into any of the specialised acceleration functions required of
today’s media rich devices and offering advantages in terms of flexibility, performance and
features when compared to the fixed function silicon blocks traditionally used in SoC designs.
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.

ZiiLABS Launch Partners

With the excitement about the ZiiLABS platform now public and the ZMS-05 in production, the
Company is pleased to be working with many OEM partners worldwide announcing products
based on ZMS including: MicroStar International, Perception digital, F&S Electronic, MediaNet,
ASTAK, PowerLinux and Grandeye.

For more information, please visit Zii.com.

There were a few more details/speculation which floated around the internet. The first was an email update from Creative, which states..

Drawing our inspiration from the intelligence of Mother Nature – who through over a billion years of evolution has designed the basic building block of life: the stem cell – we have created a stem cell-like silicon that is able to grow and multiply into different solutions and ecosystems.

With an investment that spans over 10 years, over a billion dollars and over 10,000 man-years, the world is poised to experience a breakthrough that will better lives beyond our imagination.Even in the midst of these turbulent times, you will discover incredible recession-friendly business opportunities that enable you to thrive and prosper.

To find out more about Zii and how it can change your life, visit our booth (booth #30651) at CES 2009, or go to Zii.com from 8 January 2009 for updates.

And the next was a US Trademark Office search for the term “Zii”, which seemed to be registered under Creative for a very generic usage. It listed almost all the various fields which Creative has every dabbled with.

So what is this Zii??

Knowing Creative’s love of playing with words, especially during their “viral marketing” campaigns, I looked at the big picture, to look for more clues with regards to what they were actually doing.

The HW geek in me caught on to “a stem cell-like silicon that is able to grow and multiply into different solutions“. It reminds me of dynamically reconfigurable SoCs or ECAs.

The idea is very simple.. Instead of have 1 super-fast and super-powerful core in a PC.. We can have 1000 not-so-fast and not-so-powerful cores such that, working together the 1000 will be the same at the 1 super core. But, if we can have the connections between them made dynamically reconfigurable; which is, they can be changed by the software, while the software is running; these 1000 cores can be used very efficiently.

Power savings aside (because you can individually turn off any of the 1000 cores), we can now configure (wire up) these small cores to execute the specific logic that we want.. And that suddenly opens up the possibility of many many interesting applications. Our current notions of limitations of speed and performance are totally irrelevant in such architectures.

For eg. let’s say we want to watch a video, we can configure the cores to form a H.264 decoder, and suddenly the H.264 decoding becomes a very fast process, since it’s being done automatically by the HW (Hardware), and not by SW (Software) as it is done in most cases today. If we can drasctically speed up such processor intestive tasks, like Multimedia rendering, and complex calculations, we will start seeing many more interesting advances in computing technology, including the efficiency which Creative has promised.

But why would Creative do something like this?? Which brings me to the part of the email ” 10 years, over a billion dollars and over 10,000 man-years“. 10 years is a long time. And something that Creative has been ignoring about the same amount of time is their IC Design business. Yes we’ve had the X-Fi, but that was just one, and it probably was designed much earlier. What else??

And also if Creative has really been doing this for 10 years, they must have taxed the rest of the company by drawing loads of funds and skilled manpower. Which, we have seen happening as Creative has had some financial troubles in the recent years, and also they’ve had a lack-luster product line-up following the X-Fi.

While my analysis is surely not sound, it’s something that would be really be fun to see from Creative. The concept has been looked at by various companies all over the world, but no one has put such a system into commercial applications. With Creative’s reach into the Sound Card market, it might be able to launch this technology into the Commercial market.

Well.. we can never really tell. All we can do is to wait and wander around booth #30651 at CES 2009.