Slashdot Mirror
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."
I wish they did. For a high-tech project, we decided on embedding VIA Mini-ITX motherboards. The one we picked (pressured for lowest COGS) had a C3 and a VT8235 south bridge. We ran into very weird USB and PCI communication problems, and spent almost a man year in total on trying to fix our software. It turns out that the south bridge is the problem. On the VIA Arena forums, this turned out to be a known problem (google for "VT8235 lockup"), mostly apparent when generating heavy network traffic. The "driver fixes" for Windows turn out just to throttle the network traffic.
Officially, our VIA representative still hasn't acknowlegded this problem, and we were ready to switch to a different, more "industrial" mobo. We still picked a VIA one though (with a C7 and a 8237) because frankly, their prices are hard to beat.
If you are considering a VIA mobo for an embedded application, make sure you test, test, test and don't automatically blame the SW guys when you find something weird. Don't let the fact that this is "consumer electronics" fool you. We figured that this meant cheap, well-tested, large series hardware with ppm failure rates. Apparently, that's not always the case.