In the past, Creative had intended to make a revolution with the help of its remaining operating time of ZiiLABS, but it never happened. For several years, the division has been developing multimedia chips for portable equipment, alternative SoC based on the ARM architecture, and even tablets. Creative has released ZiiLabs based for several players and on this plan to “take over the world” ended.
ZiiLabs now became the property of Intel, for which a developer can do more good on the background of the active development of the market of smartphones, tablets, and create their own SoC for mobile devices.
According to Engadget, the deal was worth $50 million of that money, $ 30 million was spent on the purchase of assets and engineering resources, and the $ 20 million paid for the licensing of a number of patents of ZiiLabs, relating to the development GPU. It is quite possible that Intel decided to abandon the PowerVR graphics processor in future incarnation’s mobile platform Atom. Creative has not commented on the deal and it is not clear whether it will continue to produce tablets and media players for OEM-customers, built on the basis SoC ZiiLabs.