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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.
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
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.