Zii

[atiflz]

I don't know anything more than disclosed, I'm just guessing what type of architecture they are using. Their declerations are ambiguous and lousy.

I'm sorry for using pipelining in an ambigious context. By saying "they have no pipeline" I was talking in the context of superscalar architecture.

By "software pipelining" I only mean dividing the software into macro blocks(assuming that application is processing streaming data) and run each block in a seperate processor in parallel.

I think their architecture is somewhat similar to the Intel one I posted above. They have simple processors and some kind of network. You can design the your software in a way that your data is divided into N part sand processed like a SIMD way, or you can configure your network so that data travels through "stages", each processor getting some input, doing something simple and forwarding the result to the next one.

I hope that was clear enough.

EDIT: where the heck is my picture?
EDIT 2: image restored

 

[Ravnos]

Wow, there's a whole lot of hate for this thing here. I guess I'm the only one who's interested in an Android-based iPod Touch competitor with expandable storage?

 

[Exophase]

Wow, there's a whole lot of hate for this thing here. I guess I'm the only one who's interested in an Android-based iPod Touch competitor with expandable storage?

Somehow putting forth a lot of hype about processing power then demoing it in the five thousandth iPhone clone is not impressive to me, no.

 

[Ravnos]

Wow, there's a whole lot of hate for this thing here. I guess I'm the only one who's interested in an Android-based iPod Touch competitor with expandable storage?

Somehow putting forth a lot of hype about processing power then demoing it in the five thousandth iPhone clone is not impressive to me, no.

They're a company, what do you expect?

"Yeah, it plays videos and stuff. It's okay I guess. Whatever. Meh."

 

[Exophase]

They're a company, what do you expect?

"Yeah, it plays videos and stuff. It's okay I guess. Whatever. Meh."

And so why should I be excited? I'm impressed by good results, I don't care about the hype. But when hype is practically all they have what is there to be impressed about?

 

[Ravnos]

They're a company, what do you expect?

"Yeah, it plays videos and stuff. It's okay I guess. Whatever. Meh."

And so why should I be excited? I'm impressed by good results, I don't care about the hype. But when hype is practically all they have what is there to be impressed about?

I never said you should be excited.

 

[Exophase]

I feel like we're not getting anywhere like this ;p

 

[atiflz]

Come on it's supercomputer! Inside a chip!

 

[OrR]

Wow, there's a whole lot of hate for this thing here. I guess I'm the only one who's interested in an Android-based iPod Touch competitor with expandable storage?

Where is the hate? At the moment, I'm amused by their marketing bullshit and I'm unimpressed by their product design. But I'm also excited about their technology and want to know if there is anything behind the hype talk. I'm more interested in their self baked Plaszma Linux than in their Android version. Android sucks, there is your hate.

 

[icurafu]

Yes, the technology is interesting and could be used for thousands uses with the software, but at this point, I can't see anything that is better than the currents smartphones. That 3d game looks like an MBX game on a QVGA phone which is guess is using 100% of the chip.

I wonder if the programming is anything like posix.

 

[torpor]

I got mine yesterday, its awesome .. very nice, light device.

The Plaszma SDK is .. AWESOME .. its fully 100% linux, but Creative have organized everything properly so that its very easy to write apps. Its all very clean and simple .. and .. well .. I love it. Still going to need some time to get some things running, but it'll be a very fun weekend project, thats for sure.

 

[lulzfish]

I got mine yesterday, its awesome .. very nice, light device.

The Plaszma SDK is .. AWESOME .. its fully 100% linux, but Creative have organized everything properly so that its very easy to write apps. Its all very clean and simple .. and .. well .. I love it. Still going to need some time to get some things running, but it'll be a very fun weekend project, thats for sure.

So you use the SDK on a desktop and transfer the programs somehow? Or..?

 

[torpor]

So you use the SDK on a desktop and transfer the programs somehow? Or..?

Yeah, the SDK is all supported through Eclipse. You write your app on your desktop in Eclipse, then transfer it to the Zii over USB for running/debugging.

GDB is fully integrated, the API selection is pretty sweet .. I've got an app running in about 20 minutes that uses Cairo for drawing and animation, and it works very, very well. Haven't managed to get anything going with sound yet (thats my main application focus: synths and effects) but that is something for the weekend perhaps.

I'm very pleased with the Zii, I think its a wonderfully rich and elegant platform, and I hope that Plaszma somehow survives in this wild and woolly market. Its a very well put together distribution, from what I have seen in the last 24 hours of playing with it .. there are some rough edges, such as the Camera API, but the word is that there will be updates in the coming weeks that address the last of these issues and the devices will start to be 100% functional shortly. I really hope we see Creative push this out there - after 6 months of Android hacking and 6 months of iPhone hacking, it sure is wonderful to be back on a 100% C/C++ front, with all the rich API's that are part of the Linux distribution known as Plaszma..

As an example for how things roll in Plaszma, you have 3 'types' of applications you can write: Application (launched from the Desktop with an icon, full GUI, etc), Plugin - a standard .so type plugin that can be loaded from anywhere and run, and Daemon - a non-GUI, non-Desktop icon process that runs in the background. Just the separation of these three realms into clean Linux-style interfaces and a foundation on known and working API's is a real treat .. I'll be damned if I look at Android Intents with lusty eyes again, and forget about the iPhone and how it treats this segregation of operations ..

EDIT: I just wanted to add that I think Creative have done something quite spectacular here with their Linux support .. its a fully 100% Linux-based device, with standard API's like cairo, libasound, and so on, but well packaged and grouped into various 'Cells' that make the experience of learning the SDK quite pleasant. I think this is one of the better Linux-based devices I've seen recently, and I've got them all .. so I look forward to taking what I learn with the Zii experience and applying it to OpenPandora, in the OS/SDK/development side of things, anyway ..

EDIT2: CELL Architecture seems to be a marketing buzz-word -- all the API's in the Plaszma SDK are arranged in 'Cells' according to what they're for - Audio Cell, Video Cell, Display Cell, etc. Haven't gotten too close to the CPU architecture yet, still trying to wrap my head around the Plaszma Linux-based SDK and see how it would be to port something over ..

 

[Enverex]

So you have one and still can't figure out the hardware it's using? Geez, it looks like they are putting a lot of effort into making this all a bit obscure and hard to see the real "specs". Also what is this thing likely to be like performance wise? It's all horribly "smoke and mirrors".

 

[torpor]

So you have one and still can't figure out the hardware it's using? Geez, it looks like they are putting a lot of effort into making this all a bit obscure and hard to see the real "specs". Also what is this thing likely to be like performance wise? It's all horribly "smoke and mirrors".

I have one and haven't *bothered* figuring out the hardware its using, yet. I only got it yesterday and I don't have all day to hack on it unfortunately. I'll definitely be getting more into it in the next few days and will let you know what I find. I do know that there is a dual-core ARM in it, and that the API's they're promoting as part of the "Cell computing" thing are all standard Linux F/OSS API's, packaged and built for the hardware. As soon as I get the time to sit down and work out the hardware specs I will, but to be honest I was just too excited by the SDK and what it offered to really get into the hardware hacking side of things so far. Hello World with Cairographics was a bit more interesting.

But anyway, if you look around the blogosphere a little, you can see there are already folks who have disassembled it. It only hit the desks of pre-orders 48 hours ago ..

EDIT: BTW, performance wise, its faster then my iPhone 3G, just testing loading videos and viewing pictures and so on .. noticably much faster, actually.

 

[Morpheus384]

It isn't a joke, but I'll be damned if I have the faintest idea as to what it is. The worst part is that they're actually selling them now, no longer just hyping them to death. I'm not enticed to buy something when they won't tell me the first thing about what it actually does beforehand. Is it an FPGA? Is it an area of DSP like processors? Is it an FPGA with DSP slices? Is it a bunch of vector processors? The language they use suggests that it can be any of these things or something else entirely.

I also think their choice of two ARM9s can't possibly make sense. One, I can understand, but why two very outdated CPUs when you're supposed to have this big grid array of heavy lifting stuff? Would much rather have a newer, better, faster ARM than two of those (not that I even know the clockspeed).

Props to first person to give better information on this.

2 ARM CPUs?......Hmmmm I've heard that somewhere before. Oh yeah, it was CNET quite a while ago(May I think). It caught my eye because they were discussing handhelds coming out in 2010 with Dual Core ARM Cortex A9 Processors. So the concept of using 2 ARM Processors is not so far fetched. Of course I know little or nothing about it, or if this article even applies, but it was thought provoking that the concept has been talked about before.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10263278-64.html

Please copy and paste in your browser as my work computer doesnt play very nice with these forum boards.

 

[Enverex]

Well, I looked up the model number of the processor and apparently it's an ARM9 processor (so several gens old) and runs at 200-266Mhz, also it's only got 8KB/8KB cache. I can't see that being too great to be honest unless there's something special going on...

 

[Exophase]

The ARM cores aren't what this is about, which brings serious question on why they bothered having two of them. The focus of the Zii hardware is supposed to be their custom parallel units.. of which we know just about nothing about. Grghh.

Dual ARM in a handheld isn't very special. Does anyone remember GP2X? Nintendo DS? iPod?

 

[sam fisher]

This topic is probably the most interesting one I have come across on this board in quite a while. Thanks for all the updates, Torpor.

 

[Lorkile]

Thanks all, especially torpor, for the information on this. My GF has been bugging me about the pandora and at least this thing has shipped, so I've been considering nabbing one (not so seriously, but the thoughts are there).