Each ZMS-05 SoC has dual ARM-926 cores with 48 programmable processor elements capable of 10 GFlops of processing power. The chip is able to re-program itself in real-time to suit the needs of the application being executed, and there's linux software to control the PEs.

source:
http://vr-zone.com/articles/the-zii-myster...8.html?doc=6408

First I saw the demo at www.ziilabs.com and thought it was a bit cheesy.
It got me interested though. Then I browsed youtube and found out a few no hype vids such as these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk-g6CRB0O8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7a6yvEDwdE

If SDK is widely available then the Zii might propel quite a lot of innovative programming..

How does this differ from Sony's Cell Processor? I don't know much about hardware, but there is a SDK available by IBM that allows to program the SPE's on the Cell Processor for writing applications on the PS3 to do parallel processing and vector graphics programming, etc. What applications will this be used for exactly?

ARM is normally all about low power, if the huge fan noise on the PS3 is to go off, the Cell processor is not.

Interesting. I mean what other differences exist though beyond that? It's funny you should mention that, because without going off topic the blu-ray laser on my PS3 just burned out. The ironic thing was I think the fan stopped working also? maybe it overheated and burned the laser out or the motor stopped working?. The only two things I am familiar with on the PS3 are the Cell Processor itself and the hard-drive. The rest of the hardware is a mystery to me! I am trying to learn more about it, but they don't divulge any details. I wasn't going to attempt to mount a new laser in the blu-ray drive. Anyway fascinating. Thanks for sharing.

saw some updates at creative site and according to http://www.zii.com/Developer/BuySDK.aspx zii has started selling sdk with free hardware - limited to one per person only (they name it the zii egg - sound like some extinct animal) some features i feel is nice to see are:
- 1080p HD Output
- 3D OpenGL ES for the creation of compelling 3D games & applications
- SD (SDHC) card slot
- HD & VGA Dual Cameras
- Hardware GPS Receiver

They don't seem to have any documentation about what the PEs actually are, but apparently they can decode video on them and do OpenGL functions, but they still need several ARM chips to run the main system. From that my guess is they're probably multiply-accumulators with a small amount of onboard memory and some fast bus connecting them, not unlike a modern GPU. Assuming 32 bit wide MACs, thats only 100MHz clock, I guess to reduce power consumption (or maybe to run at some fixed divisor off the ARM chips clock).