Via Launches New Line of Mini-ITX Boards

An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices has the skinny on Via's next-generation Epia EN mini-ITX boards, which feature its relatively new C7 processors based on the Esther C5J core. The boards will be able to run passively cooled at 1.2GHz, and will clock up to 2GHz, with 800MHz FSBs." From the article: "They target thin clients, car PCs, robotics, medical equipment, kiosks, and server appliances."

Comments

What does passively cooled really mean?

[Profane MuthaFucka]

I've got a ME6000 board that isn't reliable unless there's some air flowing over the heatsink. This was supposedly passively cooled, but I had to add a little fan blowing right at the heatsink to get the temperatures down from 60C to about 38C.

It even overheated when it wasn't in the box.

Re:What does passively cooled really mean?

[Bradee-oh!]

I run a PD as my firewall/router/server. I suffered frequent hang problems and replaced the cheap power supply I was using with a known-good, better quality supply and haven't had a problem. This is running passively cooled. I've also had a few other Epia boards in the past. My experience says they are very picky on their voltages, but overheating likely isn't the problem.

PVR

[LordSnooty]

And of course they target living-room PVR devices, but with the brouhaha over broadcast flags, maybe it's understandable that they want to keep it quiet. Do it the easy way with Knoppmyth

Re:PVR

[idonthack]

My dad uses some mobos like this for our Myth setup, with 1GHz processors and hardware mpeg decoding. They've got fans but they run really quiet, especially without harddrives. He had another fanless 600MHz one, but it was too slow to use as a Myth client. These faster ones will be great for the same purpose.

No drivers for CarPC stuff

[scsirob]

VIA so far has ignored all begging owners of other MiniITX boards to release Windows drivers that can run 800x480 resolution. This is the native resolution of nearly all 7" wide-screen displays, very popular with Car PC builders.

I sincerly hope VIA will listen this time and release a driver that fits the requests of all these CarPC project owners.

Also, there's been a MiniITX board with 12V-only power input. Unfortunately the 12V must be within +/- 5%, making it again unsuitable for Car PC usage. Why can't they release a board with wide voltage input (7V - 28V), and if at all possible with a built-in shutdown controller??

Multicore C7 = x86 Niagara?

[Hal_Porter]

Via have been making small, cheap, low power cores for some time, whilse Intel and AMD moved to large, expensive high power one.

Now there's a move to multi core designs and blade servers, and even the slowest x86 server is probably over powered for a server, you have to wonder if they could do an x86 version of Niagara

From here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_C7

"You can also see a quad-core C7, could be manufactured for the same cost as a single core P4 on 90 nm process."

Now Niagara is 8 core and each core has four threads admittedly, but there's something to be said for a four way x86 chip for blades. The power consumption wouldn't be too bad either. But you can have four C7 cores per P4 core. If I were AMD for example, I'd be playing around with an x86 Niagara.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.arch/msg/991ff 1390b277b98?hl=en&

Hmm, and I'd find (or invent) some new benchmarks too.

Personally

[hey!]

I'm much more interested in what happens when you hold the processing power constant and drop the price, as the price performance ratio drops.

I understand that it's not attractive for a company to look at lower margin items, but imagine if you could retail something like the original mini ITX boards in the price range of, say, $50 (it's currently about $110). Every garage inventor in the country would be creating new embedded computing applications.

Re:How about homemade routers?

[questionlp]

It may not be a retail product, but you can always get a Soekris kit that has multiple Ethernet interfaces, 128 or 256MB of RAM and supports CF for additional storage for around $300 (net4801-50, 128MB version, with a total of 5 Ethernet interfaces).

http://www.soekris.com/net4801.htm

It runs off of a 586-class processor and with all of the fixins, would only draw around 20-25W. Not bad for something that can run Linux or *BSD. I haven't messed with one yet, but they do look pretty good even for a small server that can provide: SSH, FTP, web, NTP, DNS, DHCP, etc. Heck, it may replace my Sun Blade 100 one of these days ;)

too slow to boot

[tota]

I've toyed with these boards on more than one occasion for fun and profit, and the thing that really prevents you from using them in the embedded space is the amount of time it takes to boot the bloody thing.
Around 30s at the best of times to get to a shell with init=/bin/bash and only a little less if you use the linux bios. Disappointing to say the least, no decent set-top box can take more than 5, maybe 10 seconds to start.
Even using suspend to boot directly into a running system is not going to help since most of this time is going to be spent in the bios.

Not to mention that some boards come with a compact flash, but you can't boot from it! What's the f... point?

Re:Great, but will it support Virtualization?

[daniel23]

Hm, my Lan server is an Epia C3-800, running SuSE 8.2 (still). It runs VMware-2.0.4 and in it another SuSE which handles the (mostly harmless, unless I link my pr0n collection) http, ftp, ssh I get here. Both host and guest OS had their uptime wrap around last summer, so I'd argue it is an not entirely unstable setup.

Oh yes, and it doesnt overheat, either, in spite of me taking all the included fans out. It has a Morex Cubid 2677 case standing on its left side, thus having convection cooling.