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Since it start to licence out Sound Blaster technology, Creative Technologies has commonly slipped below the radar, waking us up from time-to-time to declare a fresh ZEN music player or refresh to the Sound Blaster line-up.

Creative subsidiary, ZiiLabs, however, has been so busy and is just sampling its fresh ZMS-40 ARM-founded central processing unit and is presenting this chip in its Android 4.0 JAGUAR reference tablets at this week's CES.The central processing unit is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 clocked at 1.5GHz and characteristics 96 'StemCell' common purpose graphics processing unit cores.

This is not the first chip always produced through ZiiLABS, however the last release, the ZMS-20, saw small commercial uptake outside of China. Different the ZMS-20, however, the ZMS-40 basically doubles the number of cores together central processing unit and graphics processing unit, whilst keeping a same power consumption or alternatively can function at twice the efficiency functioning at the similar function as the ZMS-20.



The 96 'StemCell' graphics processing unit cores are no laughing matter and, consorting to ZiiLABS, can churn out a gigantic 58GFLOPS of function, which, to insert into perspective is 4 times the common purpose processing ability of the PowerVR SGX543MP2 got in Apple's iPad 2.

Whilst graphical function is reliant on many elements beyond common purpose processing and stays to be seen, the 'StemCell' graphics processing unit is exactly suited for high-function video encode/decode, Augmented Reality, sound processing, simulation and many number working heavy tasks and, much similar ARM's own upcoming Mali T658 GPU, will characteristic complete support for Android compliant OpenCL 1.1 to enable standardised access to entire the raw power.

We are unsure why the ZMS-20 did not see more light outside of China, may be the power consumption of this chip is also high relative to the competition or may be it is easily down to costing, however with the function figures listed through ZiiLABS, the ZMS-40 appears similar a serious contender for the tablet market, with a graphics processing unit so strong that the SoC does not still need a dedicated video decoder, leaving the complete chip heavily programmable, ZiiLABS are still claiming it will be capable of managing the future H.265 codec. What is more is, as a Creative subsidiary, the chip characteristics support for Xtreme Fidelity X-Fi audio effects.