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Sneak Preview of VIA's next-gen mini-ITX mobo
An anonymous reader writes "VIA will preview its next-generation mini-ITX board for the consumer electronics market at next week's Computex 2004 in Taipei. The EPIA SP features a new graphics and memory controller hub (GMCH) supporting faster front-side bus (FSB), memory, and southbridge interconnect speeds. It also features a C3 processor clocked at 1.3GHz, integrated PadLock Hardware Security Suite, and MPEG-4 acceleration.
Oh, and like the current top-end MII 12000 VIA board, the whole board probably draws under 20watts running flat out."
Froogle is your friend.
Hmmm.
The EPIA-800 ... it is okay I suppose, it does what I'm using it for quite well (KDE on FreeBSD for work purposes, e-mail, light web browsing, SSH, etc). It suffers from being a first-gen product, the chipset is weak, and so on.
A 1.3GHz CN400 based board will be a lot more powerful, and should be more than enough for media applications that these boards are ideally suited for.
I thought about getting one of the older ones, and my local place can order them in if you ask... try this with your local store. It's not worth hunting around online for a better price when shipping will eat the advantage many times over. With more expensive parts, it can be worth it but these things are cheap.
I imagine I'll get one when there's dual-NIC version. They're pretty tough to beat for firewalling. There's cheaper and lower power systems in existance, but you usually sacrifice quite a bit.
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
Mini-ITX.com
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Forget mini-itx, I want to know when Nano-ITX will be availible... I get the distinct feeling that it's a vaporvare promo trick... it's only 2/3 of the size of the mini-itx boards and 10x as useful/easy to put into things.... I want one :(
Interesting, VIA is announcing yet more new products... Yet, I've been looking for the past several weeks (and other posts on the Internet go as far back as Nov of 2003) for VIA's latest generation Athlon XP chipset KT880 via kt880... yet other than VIAs website, it's nowhere to be seen!!!
...no, it's not Palladium/Trusted Computing etc. Basicly, what it has is an encryption accelerator, just like it has mpeg2, mpeg4 etc. acceleration. Why? Because the processor itself is a whimp.
;). But it might just as well be used to run heavy SSH connections or your encrypted P2P net of choice.
It doesn't do anything else than what a plain 3GHz machine could do. DRM is one *application*, since most DRM'd content is also encrypted
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Here are some specs for a rack full of them...
A proof of your concept: the Mini-ITX Cluster
MMX is a set of integer vector operations, SSE is the same for floating point. Neither of these implies 686; Pentium Pro was the first processor with i686 core, and it has neither of these instruction sets.
To complicate matters further, GCC's idea of i686 seems a little different than the official spec (whatever that is). AFAIK, AMD's K6 processors are i686, but programs compiled with gcc for i686 won't run on it. I think it's about the CMOV instruction; please correct me if I'm wrong.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
...if you're an electrical engineer, no. The motherboard is probably reactive/inductive in some way, not purely resistive like a lightbulb. This means that the phase angle will be non-zero, and the true and apparent power of the circuit will be different.
...if you're talking about your electricity bill, then for all you could care, they're equal. 20W will be extremely close to 20W, regardless of what I said above. Personally I don't care much, since I live a place where most of the year have a space heater on...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I use an ATI TV Wonder VE with my M10000 board. Works fine for recording/playback, but forget about pausing live tv.
DVDs play fine, too. So does about every video codec I've thrown at it.
The FPU is a little better now. It runs at full CPU speed instead of half like the earlier C3's. It's still underpowered though. Sudhian has a review of the last generation MII 12000 here. The 1.2Ghz w/o hardware MPEG4 acceleration can't play 720x540 DIVX file smoothly. If the hardware MPEG4 works, 1.3Ghz should be fast enough for any home theater PC job except video encoding like recording TV. You'll need a TV tuner card with a hardware MPEG encoder.
It is extremely quiet (only audible humming comes from two small fans on the case) which is important to me. It is also very low on energy consumption. I got an APC Back-UPS ES-350 (just a couple of days before the big black-out here, in North-East USA --- could not have been wiser :) The UPS is rated at 8 minutes under 100W load and 2 minutes under 200W but it lasts over 40 minutes powering my server and my DSL modem.
Another thing I am really happy about is the fact that VIA seems to be doing a good job supporting Linux. Personally, I have never had trouble running Red Hat on mine (although, I hear FC2 had issues with it that were only recently fixed --- but that was FC2's problem).
Overall, I feel that this has been a really great product and would wholeheartedly recommend it. I am also very happy to see that VIA has been constantly improving them. I am looking forward to seeing the upcoming nano-ITX boards.
But this won't work on C3-2, the Nehemiah. It has SSE instead of the original C3's 3DNow. Thus I use -march=pentium3, which is fine instruction-wise. Timing and cache issues are another matter though...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I've got a nice VIA Epia board (C3 Nehemiah). :) If you don't use a recent gcc compile with i586 instead - Mine supports MMX+SSE (it has two SSE pipes).
The instruction in question is CMOV.
To build for these machines with recent GCCs build with c3 as -march or -mcpu
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
try www.idot.com
Bah. FUD. Go here to see more info. Also, there is support for the decoder specifically built into MythTV and it works very well.
But better power supplies don't simply use a cheap diode/cap bulk supply anymore because this puts a HUGE load on the AC line - especially when it's first turned on and that fat cap has to charge up. This capacitive load also causes non-ideal power factor alignment the entire time the system is on, which means your effective energy consumption (what it reads at the meter) may not actually reflect actual use in the system. Rsistive (neutral) to slightly inductive loads are generally favored by the power company and their meter equipment, and there are real benefits to optimizing power factor of euqipment (especially if you're in an office or hosting location with hundreds or thousands of computers). So, most of the better PC power supplies for PCs employ PFC, or power factor correction. Still, not all of them do.. it's something worth watching in the specifications when shopping for a supply (or a CRT monitor) for a new system.
While it is true that the FPU of the C3 still isn't up to speed with other processors, the C3 1Ghz can definatly play 720x540 MPEG4 back at full speed. I do it all the time with a CVS copy of MPlayer (DirectFB driver) on Slackware Linux. I can even play 720x460 WMV9 (windows binary DLL) with 80% cpu utilization. For comparison, libavcodec decodes 640x480 MPEG4 with only 32% CPU utilization, with 14% going to dealing with the framebuffer (not decoding, just frame copying or vsyncing).
I agree, they're fast enough for most tasks. As an experiment I moved all my work to a VIA Epia 533 Fanless motherboard (with 1 GB of RAM, which helps a lot) for three months. This is the slowest motherboard VIA sells, and I think the slowest on the market that's still in active sales as opposed to used/inventory sales. I ran both XP and Slackware 9 on the box.
CPU loading was idle most of the time. It was acceptable for email, web browsing, and word processing. There were a few places it bogged down: recalculating large spreadsheets, websites with Flash animated ads, printing, displaying PDFs (ghostview pretty much choked the system whenever it would run) and running compression (gzip tar backups would max out the load instantly.)
I upgraded to a fanless Pentium M ITX box because I could, but still use the VIAs for web/mail service, which work fine -- one box's uptime reached 240+ days before I needed to take it down for hardware maintenance.
They're not gaming systems or workstations, but otherwise completely acceptable for most uses -- and the fanless ones are pretty much silent (the loudest thing the VIA 533 PC was the hard disk seeking. Really.)