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New Nano-ITX 12cm Motherboards
Kris_J writes "mini-itx.com have exclusive pictures of VIA's new 12cm x 12cm motherboard standard they're terming 'Nano-ITX'. VIA have removed the legacy ports, moved to mini-PCI and SODIMMs and now a new batch of custom PC projects can be produced where previously there wasn't quite enough room for the motherboard. I already have an idea..."
Roll your own notebooks!
Where is the power circuitry? To run from/charge a battery?
The controller to run a native LCD?
Be sure to include some room for converters to step down the big IDE down to notebook harddrives and optical drives.
Oh and that "1 GHz C3?" It has roughly the computational power of a Celeron 600.
Feel free to invest $1200 in making one of these into a notebook with an LCD, but I'd just assume spend $1000 on a Dell 2GHz and plenty more expansion and connectivity options.
They haven't removed the worst offender of the old legacy PC, however. The BIOS is still there. PCs need to ditch BIOS and go with something decent like openboot. Also, console on an out of band management line needs to be stardand, so you can administer things remotely or when the network is down.
It doesn't need to be legacy serial, though that's what everything else uses. Put it on USB for all I care. Just make sure I can get to the system outside the network, and boot/reset/configure it from there.