ZiiLABS of Singapore has just announced a new dual core processor with integrated graphics named ZMS-20. This processor is to be followed by a quad core version at a later, but as of yet unspecified date.
The processors are specifically designed for use in the rapidly growing table market and supports Android 3.0 – the latest tablet operating system available. With the introduction of the new chips the competition for supplying processors for tablet designs heats up, with ZiiLABS entering a market dominated by ARM customers like Texas Instruments and Samsung.
ZiiLABS has taken the quite unusual route of integrating the traditional Cortex-A9 cores with a graphics solution based on the Stemcell Media Processing Cores that delivers up to 2 TFLOPS of compute power divided among 48 floating point cores. The ZMS-40 quad core version, that will formally be announced later, will double this performance as it contains 96 graphics cores.
Both chips are quite versatile and have an embedded memory controller that supports both traditional DDR2/DDR3 as well as LPDDR2 for lower power applications. There is also complete support for OpenGL: as well as programming in OpenCL. According to the spin in the press release the processor can manage 150 MPixel/sec and has built in acceleration for Adobe Flash.
ZMS-20 is already sampling and volume production is expected in the third quarter this year. ZMS-40 has yet to be formally announced.S|A
Mads Ølholm
Latest posts by Mads Ølholm (see all)
- Samsung shows off 20nm PRAM - Feb 28, 2012
- DDR4 shows up in the wild - Feb 28, 2012
- SanDisk develops the world’s smallest 128Gb flash chip - Feb 22, 2012
- Aussies create single atom transistor with precise control - Feb 21, 2012
- Chinese 16 core CPU uses message passing - Feb 21, 2012
