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Via Debuts Smallest PC Mobo Format Yet
An anonymous reader writes "Via is readying a media-oriented motherboard in what could be the next popular size for small form-factor PCs: Pico-ITX. The 'Epia PX' board measures 3.9 x 2.8 inches and features a 1GHz C7 processor, along with rich audio/video I/O, albeit mostly on pin headers. Pico-ITX measures 3.9 x 2.8 inches (10 x 7.2 cm) — exactly half the surface area of Via's already small 4.7 x 4.7-inch (12 x 12cm) Nano-ITX standard, and considerably smaller than the original 6.7-inch square (17 x 17cm) mini-ITX standard."
Via is readying a media-oriented motherboard in what could be the next popular size for small form-factor PCs: Pico-ITX.
I like the Pine client as much as the next guy, but does it really need its own motherboard form-factor?
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Nothing to see here, move along. Too small to see, keep moving. Come on! Keep moving!
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Registered .sig quotient : 1337
Via seems to have a problem delivering what they promise - at least in any reasonable amount of time. Anyone remember the Nano-ITX boards? What did that take, 2 years or so before you could buy one?
If this isn't released to OEMs only I'd be surprised if mere mortals such as you and I will be able to purchase this anytime before 2009. Seriously.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
This baords will run windows and Quicktime, I note that the Norweigans banned aipods because they claimed there were no portable players for Fairplay other than ipods. Well this system will play fairplay. So will the OQO and other pocket system, as will even tinier battery powered systems. Why do they say that Fairplay is ipod only?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I figure this would be more of a downgrade in size, rather than an upgrade. Same trippy thing happening with processors, too!
This is something I don't understand. This should be the ideal motherboard for a Car PC. But this board yet again insists on an ATX power supply.
Why not design a single supply board? Preferrably wide-range input (say 8 - 28V) and be done with it? These boards don't need +/- 12V anyway, and +5V or +3.3V is already regulated down to core voltages.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
I'm all for the micronization of the PC. I'm all for such pico-boards being employed in stand alone devices such as DVD players so I as the end user could load up my own set of custom codecs, or better yet plop in the latest and greatest drive.
I'm also for all cases of higher power efficency, and reduction of waste.
But my biggest complaint are laptops, the lack of standardization. There is no agreed upon standard for screens, main boards, power supplies, ect... ect. They are very much presently a throw away technology.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Do you guys think this has enough processing power to control the lightswitch relays in my home? I'm told that Linux + J2EE is an "enterprise-aware" solution, and I'd like to know if I can run that (with the additional on/off lightswitch software) on this computer.
Thanks.
P.S. If I get frisky, I might get it to log indoor/outdoor temperature to permanent storage.
But their drivers are utter crap. I've owned a couple micro-ITXes and none of them ran well, either Linux or Windows. Via just says things like, "well, try not to DMA much." Or quietly push out a bugfix bios three years late. They claim that many of their drivers are open source and then steadfastly refuse to release source. Fiona, just because you promise to release source in 4 months, that doesn't mean you can claim they're open source today. And really, given Via's abysmal past performance at opening source (no a shim plus a binary blob is NOT open), I wouldn't hold my breath.
I'll never buy Via again, no matter how small they make their boards. It's a crying shame because, really, their hardware is just gorgeous.
So what's next, Femto-ZTX? Eventually, they're gonna run out of prefixes.
And what's worse, your computer will be small enough to swallow, while the power supply will require a forklift to move it around.
VIA have a nasty habit of announcing technology, and not shipping it. Look at the NTX format. They announced it, and for the next several years you just could not buy them retail.
If you are building OEM devices, they may sell to you - but there are other alternatives out there for mass production besides VIA.
And to second another poster - there are always problems with the drivers. If they were building the same quality in a more conventional marketplace (ie desktop) people would put them in the same marketspace as many of the original 'all in one' boards and avoid them in droves.
VIA - if you are serious - show it. If not just go blow away.
It turns out to be less like vaporware than the nano-itx format. I was waiting a while for the nanoitx boards to come out and they never really materialized. There is a demand for this sort of thing VIA, lets go!
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
I see video, I see IO, but I don't see RAM, how do I put ram on that thing.
No seriously... I couldn't see it in the article as spec'ed on board and I certainly couldn't see a socket for it?? So where is it?? Did I miss something obvious? (I will admit its only 9am and I am running low on coffee today)
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They haven't even been able to get out Nano ITX in quantity in several years. To me, this looks like it's gonna stay vaporware as well.
You know, I love the format and ruggedness of my CF-M34, but the performance kind of sucks. Since all I really want is the case, perhaps this is a solution - albeit one requiring a bit of hardware hacking.
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
I think those pico-ITX mobos are nothing more than a new tech-demo, with no real plan for mass production
They must have worked with Apple on this one.
3.9"?? that mobo couldn't satisfy even the geekiest nightelf.
So where's the memory slot? I see no mention of how much onboard RAM it has - how do you add memory to this thing?
This is cool - when things get this small it will only be a matter of time before we start seeing PCs that look like C64's or Atari 600XLs i.e. size of a thick keyboard with a few ports at the back. Stick on MAME and have a seriously fun little toy.
Heck, why not just stick on an Atari 800 & C64 emulators too. You could even go really mad and well, use it as a PC with Open Office etc.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
i have two problems with the VIA Mini Range
1: Low Performance
Even the 1.5 GHZ VIA Cores perform badly, only a nudge faster than a P3. there are other options, such as the pentium boards (see point 2) and an AMD socket 754 board (Why 754? , why not AMD2, even 939 just so we can use dual core!)
2: Price
These things cost a silly amount, here in the UK its about £90 entry for the pathetic 500mhz boards, and about £150 for a 1.5GHZ via. or you can pay £150 for a intel board, but still need to buy a proccessor
And the nano ITX, well now those are ugly, for the cost of one of those i can get an xbox360...
When are these going to go away? Nobody I know uses a CRT any more. Why not include a DVI connector on the back instead? For that matter, why do all graphics cards and many low-end LCD screens employ these old VGA interfaces?
What's next? Vi-ITX? Emacs-ITX?
Seriously, this little thing screams "Tiny wireless system in a closet" to me. Aside from the ancient video connector, this thing really needs a wireless NIC built in to it. Imagine it: A Car PC that can be accessed from the comfort of your living room. A server in a shoebox in the closet. A media PC the size of a DVD player...
All of those things would be so much nicer without the burden of running CAT5 everywhere. Hell, some shielded patch cables will probably weigh more than the computer itself.
It's painful to see something come out that is a wonderful idea but that is executed so poorly.
But their drivers are utter crap.
Actually, their hardware is crap too, when pushed.
I had to stop buying Via too after all three of my Via-based boxes glitched in different ways. The worst problem was terminal bus lockups on doing anything even mildly intensive with 2D graphics. And no, they were all different models of motherboard, so it's not just one rogue product.
I get the impression that Via hardware designers simply don't understand adhering to bus specs and defensive design. Their hardware is cute and advanced in their low-power niche, but really flakey.
Sorry Via, but in the Linux world we don't treat bus lockups and the need to reboot our machines as normal.
The so-called 'contractor' edition... When a client tells you to shove it, you can actually go 'yes sir!'.
This is quite clearly vapourware. I would be very surprised to see a board for sale within the next 2 years. With their previous generation, VIA announced NANO boards a good few years before you could actually buy one. Don't hold your breath.
The motherboard's size really isn't the constraining factor in mini systems.
The reason people use micro-ATX systems is because they can still use (at least one of) their regular PCI cards in it. Without that, you could just as well load up any really tiny, oddball embedded system that has video-outs.
The size of a PCI card, perpendicular to a motherboard, will continue to constrain the minimum case size. Until some company gets the bright idea to bring risers back from the dead.
I can't help but wonder why 1U and 2U rack server designs haven't been repurposed into cheap, consumer-level DVRs.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
...and they physically can.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
I for one, welcome our new VIA motherboards.
Look where the I/O ports are ... oh yeah NOT ON THE BOARD.
They're just moving the problem to somewhere else.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I can't really add to the comments here except to reiterate that these things are absurdly overpriced. It seems to me at least that one could take a Freescale or similar based Mobo, throw in a DIMM expansion slot and be done with it. While not terribly fast it would serve as a good general purpose compute appliance. I suppose if you wanted to get fancy you could include headers for things like DVI, VGA, mini PCI and so on. It is patently crazy that mini/nano ITX fanless boards costs hundreds of dollars. The demand is there and supply is being arbitrarily restricted or worse, doesn't exist at all, in order to keep prices inflated.
One could buy an old laptop, like a Thinkpad T40, refurbished for $450 and be ahead of the game vs. a fanless ITX based system. Hell, if you got one with a broken screen & a dead battery you could save another $250. And at an inch thick and fanless for the most part except when under high load, it's as unobtrusive as anything else.
Not so small (118mm x 153mm x 38mm), but more sexy.
http://www.genesippc.com/efika.php
* Freescale MPC5200B PowerPC SoC up to 400MHz
* 118mm x 153mm x 38mm
* 128MB 266MHz DDR RAM
* 44-pin IDE connector
* 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet
* 2x USB ports
* 1x RS232 Serial port
* Stereo Audio out, Microphone and Line-input
* 33/66MHz PCI with optional 90 AGP riser slot
* RoHS Compliant
Several reasons. First and foremost, your friends aren't representative of most users. Going into my office on an average day, there are probably a 5:1 or 10:1 ratio of CRT displays to LCDs. Monitors just don't burn out that fast -- most of them are probably 10+ years old now, and still running fine. Not everyone is going to go out and buy (or their manager is going to approve!) a LCD monitor, when they have 50 perfectly good 17" CRTs sitting in a closet.
Not that it really matters to this motherboard's market, but graphic design and video users are mostly still on CRTs, because the gamut of LCD sucks terribly. If you're doing prepress on a LCD, you are wrong. (Or else you're so good you can just tell what the colors are going to look like via ESP, in which case, why not get rid of the monitor completely?)
Also, even with LCD displays, a lot of low-end ones still use VGA as an interface. I don't really know why they do this, except that they wanted to market to people who didn't have DVI-based motherboards or graphics cards, but it's the situation. Most of the sub-$150 LCDs that I've seen (not that I've looked in the past few months) had VGA interfaces. And sometimes, this isn't even as bad as you think; as long as you drive it at the right resolution, most people can't tell the difference anyway.
VGA is the lingua franca of the computer-graphics world, and will be for some time. Eventually, DVI is going to take over, but there are probably billions of dollars of VGA-equipped gear sitting around, that people don't want to have to use expensive DAC boxes to connect to their new system. (Not just monitors, but projectors and the like, too.) I suspect that VGA is one of those things, like ISA, that you're going to find hanging around on equipment -- like a sort of digital appendix -- long after its utility to most users has gone, simply because people have grown to expect it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I wonder if someone messed up their math. Last time I checked 3.9x2.8 = 10.92 square inches which is considerably larger than 6.7 square inches. Oh, you meant 6.7x6.7 which is 44.89 square inches. /math grammar nazi off
Have you found any affordable and normal sized screens that are 12 VDC input? That's my stumbling block on making the po' mans luggable and low power system. They want a mint just for a 7 or 8 inch screen, at least any I have found.
That commodore mod is exactly the form factor of choice though, very good work and along the lines I was thinking. Right now my mini is just stuck in an old AT case, because I had it kicking around and it was the easiest.
The new boards just shown though..eventually we will be able to get a true powerful PDA thing that at home can just have normal components that can plug into it, making a desktop out of the PDA on demand. That's what I really want.
What's most interesting about these mobos is that they're fanless. So they can be used in multiples around roomsful of normal people, especially driving TVs and stereos, without the annoying noise driving people crazy. But that's also true of some PII mobos.
These mobos support 1GHz CPUs, but they're Via C7. So what's the performance of these new mobos actually running, say, Linux (no X or desktop) and a streamplayer like madplay or even MythTV clients? Compared to their Pentium competitors, or even uCLinux running on these Blackfin DSP boards?
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make install -not war
The article mentions the board's HDTV output capabilities. And, I'm sure many would like to use a tiny board like this for a MythTV frontend.. I know I would. But, if they ever actually become available (unlike the Nano-ITX vaporware debacle), don't run out and buy one until you know the specifics.
- The VIA CPUs are much too slow to do software decoding of HDTV material
- Their integrated video has MPEG2 decoding capability, but with a ton of caveats
- Unknown hardware capabilities. Even though they claim HD output, the MPEG2 decoder may not be able to handle HD frames. in the past, "Unichrome Pro" chips could all do HD decoding. In recent chips, even Unicrome Pro are limited to 1024x1024. Many people have been burned by this and bought what turned out to be useless VIA motherboards.
- Poor driver support. Basically no support from VIA, and a dedicated, but limited group of developers on the OpenChrome project. VIA made a lot of promises about open specs, software, etc, and then produced very little, had licensing issues, closed source drivers, and basically abandoned the linux drivers.
- Stability. Even when working, the XXMC / XvMC VLD MPEG2 acceleration can be troublesome, and will not do smooth playback.
The linked article obviously doesn't have good information.. they claim HDTV output via the S-Video port, which is of course not possible.
I would recommend waiting until some brave soul has already proven one of the boards to do what you need, and preferably has a netboot linux image available for download.
The designers of this board have decided that VGA and Ethernet are the two things everyone's going to want, and that seems right to me. The 3.9 x 2.8" form factor looks like it just barely fits inside a 2" x 4", 22.5 cu. in. junction box, (the deepest usually available) leaving room for a nano power supply. I can definitely see these things being used in such an application, where there is no visible computer, just a wall plate with the two connectors.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
What about a ROKR? it plays itunes music.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I've had zero problems with my M10000, running it on Linux using the standard open source drivers, which incidentally VIA helped by releasing source for.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The Picotux
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Could you imagine a cluster of those? Smallest....cluster....ever!
with this, I'd like to frankenstein a cheap-ass casio keyboard to be a VST host, remove all the general midi controls and printing on the case, and replace with a knob controller...
damn. why aren't people selling this. (or better yet, selling a DIY kit)...
I really hope to see DIY projects like this come on line with these little PCs...
music - http://www.subatomicglue.com
And MS always implements the specs right... Just don't came here complaining when they say that "it's a feature, not a bug".
Rethinking email
Every semester, you pack all your stuff into the car to go to school. You carry your stuff up the stairs to the fourth floor. You place your computer on a small desk, perhaps 60x110 cm or a bit more than 2x3 feet. All your stuff must fit in a small room that you share with somebody you probably hate. Five months later, you carry your stuff down the stairs to your car again.
Probably there is no air conditioning to deal with the heat given off by a CRT.
If you are unlucky, you keep tripping a circuit breaker that was designed (40 years ago) to handle the load of a shaver and an alarm clock.
The CRT's shadow mask or apreture grill gets misaligned from all those trips up and down the stairs, as well as from the occasional fistfight with your roommate or his drunken girlfriend.
Try it in Linux. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. The drivers are out there and they work. Since you're doing an embedded product, I assume the inability to run MS Office is not exactly an issue.
Tech Public Policy stuff
PINE is from U of Washington
The industrial computing world has evolved its standards on small-size computers years ago. One particularly strong standard is PC/104, which offers 3.6 x 3.8" board size with ready solutions for extensibility (ISA in the original, PCI, and now even PCI-Express). It is supported by dozens of vendors and compatible extension boards are available for many purposes. Another more recent standard is EPIC, which offers more board space (and more functionality) combined with PC/104 extensibility in a 4.5" by 6.5" package. Both standards are for industrial use and therefore the products are long-lived and usually more stable than their consumer-oriented counterparts. Unfortunately, this also affects the prices, which puts those solutions out of range for everyone but the most wealthy hobbyists :)
psh... no PCI slots, no AGP slots, not even SLI for my video cards. This will never catch on :)