ZiiLABS introduces two new CPUs for Android tablets - the ZMS-20/40

11 May, 2011

It seems that a competitor to the Tegra 2 and Exynos chips has just entered the tablet competition. Meet the dual-core ZMS-20 and quad-core ZMS-40 from ZiiLABS. The ZMS-20 is clocked at 1.5GHz and offers 1080p video playback, OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics with 3D support and DDR3 compatibility.

There's not much word on the quad-core ZMS-40, though. Its architecture however is supposed to scale up to 6GHz and should support up to 100 cores. Wait what? Those are some mind-blowing numbers.

The ZMS-20 is based on the ARM Cortex-A9 architecture. It's HDMI 1.4-ready and supports OpenCL. It will be released with a dedicated Android tablet platform and SDK.

Both chipsets are optimized for Android Honeycomb use, so their main target are, naturally, droid tablets.

The dual-core ZMS-20 chipset is sampling as we speak and should become available this summer, while the more intriguing quad-core ZMS-40 still has some way to go. We hope to hear more news soon and will keep you posted.

Here's a video of Hock Leow, President of ZiiLABS. He'll give us a quick tour of the ZMS-20 CPU.