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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."
you run windows then. as there is no NAVIGATION software for linux available.
Yes gpsdrive is a moving map display but it does not have any navigation capabilities... I.E. "turn left in 300 feet continue on E drive for 5000 feet and then merge left."
I would LOVE to have some real linux navigation software.... but delorme will never make a native linux app and only their old version 5.0 will run under wine correctly.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If you just want small size, use PC/104 at 3.6" x 3.8" (90mm x 96mm). You get limited CPU speed, but you can make a tiny stack of modules.
1.3Ghz should be enough for anyone but....
The VIA C3 had a rather poor floating point unit, so for apps that need it (e.g. 3D games) they do very badly.
Of course for playing MP3 or WMA files and office apps the older 533MHz (Eden 5000) version was nippy enough :-)
As far as I'm aware they havent improved the FPU yet. Someone let me know if I'm wrong. This armchair CPU designer would of liked to see them throw more silicon at this area.
Simply increasing the clock speed always generates more heat, a more complex FPU would only generate more heat if your making use of the FPU.
Controlling a fans RPM speed with CPU temperature is trivial so this makes a lot of sense.
VIA chips have crappy floating point performance compared to the competition, so this might affect cluster suitability.
These little boards would make excellent web browsing machines, or little web and file servers.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
there are benchmarks all over, google for "via epia review" and you are sure to get some good ones. Anecdotally, they are plenty fast for basically everything but 3d games, multimedia creation, and viewing very highly compressed (mpeg4, high bitrate divx) video. This new board will hopefully change that. I've used one (an 800 mhz) as a desktop machine for a co-worker, and the only thing they commented on was how quiet and little it was compared to their old (p4) machine. They made no mention of a performance hit, and they work on the thing all day long. I've also used one (1 Ghz) as a firewall / server for my dad's business. And frankly, the poor thing is bored.
Flash works fine, even those silly animated shorts and games. Remember that a "slow as balls" computer by todays standards will likely meet their (your parents) needs just fine. The biggest benefit over a cheap athlon is that these can be made small and quiet, making them unobstrusive. They also run cool enough that they don't affect the temperature of the room they are in noticably, unlike athlons / P4 which in a lot of ways are very expensive space heaters....