By ONG BOON KIAT
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DESPITE the marketing rhetoric and fanciful punning, Creative Technology's new Zii (pronounced zee) 'stem-cell computing' technology could be just what the doctor ordered as far as restoring some much needed confidence to the struggling company.
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As Creative continues to sag under waning sales of its by-now commoditised MP3 offerings, as well as having to lean on the hardly cutting-edge businesses of making Apple iPod accessories and flashy PC speakers, the prospect of a new revenue stream driven by groundbreaking intellectual property is surely heartening for Creative investors and pundits.
Can Zii turn Creative's sagging fortunes around? At first glance, the essentially new type of computer chip technology looks promising.
For one thing, it appears to have a mainstream appeal that has so far eluded the company's flagship audio technology X-Fi. In Creative's favour is also the fact that Zii is ready to roll: the entire Zii platform, which includes both hardware and software components, is already in production.
And if this technology's promise to be flexible, scalable and energy-efficient pans out, it could be a hit, especially with mobile device makers, who are always looking for ways to incorporate ever more power-hungry features into devices such as smartphones.
Spawned from Creative's graphics chip subsidiary 3DLABS, which has now been renamed ZiiLABS, Zii is trumpeted as a new kind of computer chip platform which lets electronic device manufacturers make more powerful and cheaper products.
Its reference to stem cells refers largely to the Zii chip's ability to change personality, morphing into chips that can carry out different functions when required or programmed to do so. Stem cells, which are part of the body's repair system, can similarly morph into different cell types to perform different biological roles.
Such an approach promises to be more efficient than the purpose-built functionalities that conventional processors have.
Zii has another cell-like trait: many chips can be strung together to collectively perform a task. Creative said that its first Zii chip - dubbed ZMS-05 SoC (System-On-Chip) - can be harnessed to crank out a teraflop of processing power over an A4-sized footprint.
One teraflop, or one trillion floating-point operations per second, is rarely seen in consumer applications today. A top-of-line AMD graphics chipset released last June was only one of a few commercial chipsets to have breached this mark.
Interestingly, Creative is thinking even bigger, envisaging a Zii array that matches up to massive supercomputers, but at '100 times smaller, 100 times greener and 100 times lower cost'.
It is too early, of course, to predict Zii's success. As always, turning potential into bona fide demand is elusive.
Popular tech blog Engadget, for instance, has noted that the predecessor of ZMS-05, an older 3DLABS processor, was also similarly impressive but did not create an impact when it debuted in 2006.
There could also be stiff competition looming for Creative. A jointly-developed microprocessor technology by Sony Computer Entertainment, Toshiba and IBM employs a similar approach of using co-operative computing cells to achieve immensely high levels of performance. This technology, simply called Cell, is used in the Sony PlayStation 3 gaming console.
But one thing is certain: savvy marketing and quick feet in forging partnerships will be needed if Creative wants to propel Zii into mainstream consciousness.
On the second count at least, the initial signs are good. At Zii's launch during the mega International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas two weeks ago, Creative announced no less than seven partners that have signed up to develop products using the ZMS processor. Another piece of good news: top-tier Taiwanese PC maker MicroStar International is on that list, adding credence to Creative's new technology at this early stage.
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