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The Incredible Shrinking Motherboard
DrGonzo was among several who submitted
news of the new Mini Motherboard from via. The Mini ITX standard is just 170mm squared, and this
motherboard has audio, ether, IDE, video and tv out. Not bad for something
so tiny. Here's an article about the small wonder.
Also on Via's site, the white paper describing this small wonder:
http://www.via.com.tw/en/VInternet/Mini-iTX.PDF
This
is coming down hard... (offer up temporary local mirrors for subscribers and I might bite, it'd also sit well with the people who get taken out from a /.ing)
link to google's cached version
and the text from from theregus.com:
VIA Technologies is expected to launch a very small format motherboard this month. Called the mini-ITX, the fully integrated mobo measures up at 170mm x170mm (yes, it's square), making 50 per cent smaller than the FlexATX form factor, VIA claims.
The Mini-ITX is supplied with an 800MHz Eden x.86 C3 processor (in EBGA packaging), incorporating 128K L1 and 64K L2 cache; integrated AGP2 graphics 2X; PC100/133 SDRAM support etc. You can check out more spec here.
The board will retail for around $100, and gets its first mainstream outing at CeBIT this week.
The Mini ITX is targeted at the embedded market - expect most units to disappear into printer routers and the like; but VIA is also reporting 'grassroots interest' in the product from home PC and commercial system builders.
The Mini-ITX may be small, but it is not 40 per cent smaller than any other form factor around, as VIA believes. The Danish firm, maker of the M-Series PC, deploys a 157mm x146mm mobo. ®
Sorry if I have to point it out, but... :)
170 mm * 170 mm is NOT 170 mm^2
This motherboard is 28900 mm^2, or 289 cm^2.
Still a nice little board, at that
free the mallocs!
C3 doesn't really require that much cooling, and could probably cope with a smallish passive heatsink stuck on with thermal adhesive. The processor is integrated onto the board anyway, so it most likely does come with a cooling solution, but they took it off for pretty pictures.
News on HardOCP today. The Intel board uses i845 and has 10 USB2 ports but support for DDR266 only. The AMD board uses KT333 and has 4 USB2 ports and 6 USB1.1 ports, and support for DDR333.
not to karma whore or anything but, check Google's HTML version of the PDF
Anyone notice this in the description of TV-OUT:
Integrated Macro Vision 7.01.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Mini-iTX
170mm 170mm
iTX
215mm 191mm
Flex ATX
215mm 191mm
Mini ATX
284mm 208mm
ATX full
305mm 244mm
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
For more about form factors, here the definitive site.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
DOC is DiskOnChip, from M-Systems. It's a flash memory chip that can replace the BIOS chip and provide some amount of nonvolatile storage.
Their magic is in their BIOS "enhancement" code that makes the flash memory appear as a bootable disk drive. In DOS, it shows up as C:, and they have boot code for several operating systems, including Linux. Linux drivers for mounting/writing the filesystem are also available.
Second, you don't need a PCMCIA slot to use CompactFlash as a boot device. CompactFlash is already IDE-compliant and can be directly plugged into the IDE controller with the right adapter. They run about $20 from places like this.
The CompactFlash solution would give you a removable boot device that could be easily mounted/read on any other system. The DOC is smaller, but more convenient since it's already integrated.
4 tiles up by 4 tiles wide is 16 tiles, not 4.
170 mm length by 170 mm width is 28900 square mm.
Anyway the original posting says 170mm square, which is correct, not 170 square mm.
enuf.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Most are viable points, however, *display* on TV should always, in theory, be fine (though you can certainly tell the difference side-by-side, most of the time you can't tell independently. So the point about playing DVD on TV can be thrown out, computers are no worse, if not better than most standalone players (progressive-scan easier). So you refuse to buy MacroVision products? Have you bought any Paramount VHS tapes? A standalone DVD player? Those are MacroVision encoded. The point is to screw over VCRs, by sending signal spikes that would not be perceived by the human eyes but trick a VCR into reducing signal strength of normal content to compensate. On much older VCRs, which don't automatically adjust the signal, this makes no difference. Also, you can pick up devices to defeat MacroVision at Best-Buy that work perfectly. Pre-MacroVision would mean pre-PCI, this is not new technology. Fortunately, if you search the web enough you can probably figure out how to disable MacroVision for nearly any video chipset.
As an aside to your point, in most cases, MacroVision is typically only enable when the drivers detect that content is being displayed that "shouldn't" be copied, so game recording probably works. I think in most cases they go by process listing and display state, if you open an overlay in a different colorspace, macrovision enables, if realplay.exe, mplayer.exe, qtplayer.exe appears in process table, macrovision enables. This is one of the major reasons companies are reluctant to release open-source drivers for tv-out devices, as they all have modifiable registers for enabling/disabling macrovision, and open source drivers would probably get them it hot water with the MPAA/RIAA.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It would be an exception rather than the norm for boards in this class (which are generally intended for set-top and managed PC systems...). I've got several differing variations of this sort of motherboard as well as others in this class- they all support PXE.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I guess you only use a computer to play games on.
They actually have quite a few other uses. How do you program a FPGA using usb? how about legacy printers? LED control? modified pushbutton interface? custom card scanners?
I think you need to come to terms that the only use of a computer isn't just to play games with the newsest usb joystick/mouse/keyboard.
In this case there was only one .jpg inside the .zip file.
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
>C3 doesn't really require that much cooling, and could probably cope with a smallish passive heatsink stuck on with thermal adhesive.
I've sold C3 integrated motherboards (and, other than heat generation, nothing has changed with the cyrix CPUs, IMHO). These processors require approximately the same cooling as a 486. A larger passive heatsink would probably be fine, but the boards I sold had what at first look appeard to be a 486 CPU fan.
If you want a cheap board with a small size, 100% integrated, mostly linux supported, cheap (in all ways), and availiable now, seek out the PCChips M787. It is VERY similar to this board, just 2 slots bigger. Plus it fits in ATX cases and uses a trickly of power supply. The fan is almost inaudible, so this is an awesome home-entertainment mobo.
But really, its cheap in all senses of the word. Don't say I didn't warn you!