Slashdot Mirror
Moore's Law for Motherboards
An anonymous reader writes "VIA CEO Wenchi Chen revealed a business card-sized motherboard billed as the 'world's first industry-standard form-factor for PC/phone convergence,' at Computex this week. The mobile-ITX" board measures 3 x 1.8 inches. It's half the size of pico-ITX, which was half the size of nano-ITX, which, in turn, was half-the size of mini-ITX — which was already small. It's not clear whether VIA will make these tiny motherboards available to end users, or if they will only be sold directly to device makers, but generally all of VIA's tiny motherboard formats have spread around to other suppliers and become widely available."
...welcome these new business cards. Just go to a trade show, collect business cards, and build a Beowulf cluster out of them!
...or are you just happy to see me?
Bearded Dragon
Wake me when they have an equivalent System on a chip.
I always thought of Creationism as the Raving Right's version of the Loony Left's Anthropogenic Global Warming-brightmal
That's 7.62 cm x 4.57 cm, for everyone reading this who isn't American.
Please put all smart-ass/pro-SAE comments about the metric system below this post, thanks.
I can't wait. Now I can finally make a powerful wearable computer. Now just to find someone who makes LCDs that look like glasses for a reasonable sum of money and I'm off to a wonderland :)
It is always better to be a first grade version of yourself than a second grade version of someone else.
Imagine building itty-bitty robots...
Or digital picture frames...
Case-modding an Altoids tin...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Sure, the pico-ITX measures about one pico-astronomical-unit, but why the hell do they measure motherboard sizes with this unit?
Where things get smaller and faster every year! Amazing!
The same technology that allows us to fit hundreds of millions of transistors on a chip allows us to build a tiny botherboard the functionality in a few custom asics and processors. And so it goes.
The only reason this is "impressive" is because Via is the first company to show it off as if it were sexy. The industry has already been producing small, PCI bus motherboards for years.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Where is the power supply? Where is the storage? What is the processor? How much memory ... etc... Small computing already exists. What we need is less shitty small computing.
Get a processor in the MIPS rating of say a 500MHz AMD K8 processor on a credit card device, with self-contained power, decent memory [say at least 128M], etc. Then we'll chat.
Until then my Gumstix 400MHz ARM with 64M of ram will do fine for small time computing [albeit slowly...]
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I thought Moore's Law was:
Everything is a government plot.
This could be a nice node for building city-wide mesh networks. :)
How I hope they make this available to consumers. It opens a very intriguing possibility - making your own linux cellphone.
Think about it - completely customisable UI, thousands of possible plastic cases (I imagine many 3rd party case manufacturers will spring up), second-to-none music and video support, and the ability to use or port millions of existing linux apps.
Maybe in a couple of years time you'll be able to buy a bunch of cellphone parts at radio shack, and assemble them into a custom phone as is currently possible with PCs.
TI already has your system on a chip. It's called the DM6442, DaVinci.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
In contrast to the CPU speed (which increases, and therefore Moore's law can be applied), you can't decrease size to all eternity. There WILL be an absolute minimum (see Kelvin as example).
There is a good Pico-ITX review at http://www.mini-itx.com/reviews/pico-itx/ "As a reminder of just how small this thing is, employees at a Japanese store got hold of an early board and put together this Pico-Gameboy. The system boots XP from a 4GB Compact Flash card, with a VGA output and 12V DC input on one side." Enjoy
Yahoooo.... looks like I can build miPhone until the price of the other brand drops.
Yes, this is the first to not be exclusive to a device. But what does this guy think runs his ipod? Phone? PDA? Despite popular opinion, its not magic, there are motherboards in these machines.
The embedded world has had complete computers on "motherboards" this small for quite some time. Check out gumstix sometime.
The fundamental problem with PC based motherboards has always been heat dissipation and interface connectors. Heck, the back panel of my desktop uses more area for the connectors than exists on this board. There are processor heatsinks bigger than this thing!
PC's have always been about cheap computing power, not low power dissipation or form factor. I remember a time when the power of your desktop was considered commensurate with the size of the box - we had friends putting regular motherboards into server towers so they could "impress" fellow geeks.
Not that I would mind x86 in the embedded world, but it seems to me that this is going nowhere fast. The problem isn't technical - it's business. Most embedded systems run some sort of ARM variant, which would mean that code would have to be ported to x86. Furthermore, there's no way this would make it into a cellphone - primarily because of the fact that it is x86, and the carriers are adamantly opposed to the prospect of the consumer being allowed to run unauthorized code on their cellphones.
Linux already runs on the ARM, and you still aren't seeing a proliferation of ARM-based general purpose computers. While this would be nice for a sub-notebook, the problem is that sub-notebooks, while a personal favorite of mine, typically have not done well in the marketplace. Consider the HP Jornada, which was discontinued after a few short years. And it seems today that that trend is toward larger, not smaller, laptops.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
How did a non geek slip in? Government spies, I tell you!
Pictures and more info at TR and specs at VIA
Touchscreen?! I'd prefer a WS in there and do away with the "Dock", and then a PCCARD slot for expansion, but anyhow..
Belief is the currency of delusion.
A tiny processing device is nice, but will someone please make a generic laptop case for putting these things in? I need a box in which to put such off-the-shelf components so I can fix and upgrade when I need to. A DVD-drive-sized bay for removable drives would be nice (but include connectors for a battery for when my power needs exceed my needs for a drive).
Here's my first suggestion for what to do with this thing. I want a handheld (something the size of an battery-powered face shaver or large cell phone) written language translator. On the out-facing side is a mini-scanner and on the other side is a graphics LCD screen.
Suppose you are in some place where you can't read the language (it does happen in the age of 500-seat 6000km airliners). You get a newspaper, wave the scanner over the text, and within about three seconds, the scanned writing appears in English on the LCD. You can either pop in small memory cards for different language families or have their programs stored on your laptop for downloading.
Another feature would be a built-in microphone with a program that has been trained to your voice so that you can speak into this mic and have your words translated into the written form of the local language and displayed on the LCD.
I'd be willing to pay about $100 US for this device. I'll bet a lot other people would also. Anyone interested in developing it? Would we have to pay royalities on a language? Could such a device be built on this new miniature PC card? Am I just dreaming?
I had a via mini-itx 533MHz system for a while. It didn't even perform on the same level as an equivalently clocked p3 despite all the advances made in the intermediate time. While these might be cool for carpcs, they probably won't be good for a small desktop.
business card-sized motherboard
The first order was placed by one Mordecai Sahmbi.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Wait a min... it's smaller than a Motorola RAZR? Could this be the next motherboard for the iPhone? Native x86 MacOS X on said phone anyone?
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Can anybody even imagine how amazing it would be if cell phone networks became like wifi? You pay a monthly fee for access and you're on. Devices like this motherboard would really really open up the possibility for a homebrew-cellphone market. What would be very interesting to see is cell phone carriers become more like ISPs. You get some bandwidth from them, and you get to use it for pretty much whatever you want.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
I don't think so. Moore's Law deals with the doubling of the number of transistors in IC's every eighteen months. It has nothing to do with motherboard shrinkage. Methinks the headline is a bit misleading.
-ScottMy other sig is a Glock
No, I'd consider that very unlikely.
The driver for smaller x86 boards is home media PCs and similar applications. For that, people want small, silent, AND powerful enough to handle video codecs.
But even without those, a portion of the general public wants small and quiet PCs. Dell, HP, Acer, and Asus have been selling compact PCs for some time. (However, Dell is not yet offering Ubuntu pre-loads on a compact.) There is a trend in that direction.
Or an asterix server?
Designing a motherboard is a miserable experience these days because of the memory bus speeds. You almost have to be an RF engineer to understand how to make the bus work at all.
The shorter the bus, the better. If you can get it short enough (good luck sucker) you can ignore the inductance and capacitance of the traces. Actually, with a 1 GHz bus, you can't ignore any trace longer than about a millimeter. Past that length, you have to treat it as a transmission line.
The ideal motherboard would be about the size of the cpu plus the board-edge connectors. Never mind putting the memory on long plug in modules. Solder it directly to the opposite side of the board from the cpu. Or maybe you could plug the memory into the same kind of socket the cpu plugs into. The idea is to reduce the distance between the cpu and memory as much as possible.
I like Xterminals, but I'm a dinosaur and remember the Real Thing: terminals that did X and you could log into the networked machine[s]. Sort of like a VT220 doing graphics. They ran BOOTP (iso DHCP) and TFTP to boot.
Now you'd want boot from flash and DHCP. The minicomp would be a small box like a SohO router with SVGA out (only 2D required), 10/100baseT or wireless, a wall-wart for power, and USB or PS/2 for kbd/mse. Very tidy, very neat and very cheap. Add monitor, kbd, mouse and network to run. Hardware specs very similar to a SoHo router: 486-class CPU, 64 MB RAM, 64 MB FLASH. Tight Linux SW.
Onboard SSH would be a must, but a key design decision would be whether to incorporate a browser client to the local X server. Doing so would usually improve performance and always cut X-traffic. But this would jeopardize making the box a stateless appliance. That might depend on whether the box was tethered to a LAN server, or expected to work standalone. Flash cards or USB sticks could hold state.
With software, you can do much the same thing to much more powerful desktop and laptop machines using something like a Knoppix boot CD.
He asked for it.
... we'll have mobile phones that can do almost everything that a desktop machine can, except with different display options. However, this development will not have any real meaning unless broadband flat-rate data connections also become available for them. Unfortunately, whether such a magical future ever comes to be is up to the telecom industry, and knowing them I'm not holding my breath.
or more precisely, Magic Smoke that runs the electronics. I know, I have let a lot of it out in my time.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Watch your step, I just droped my motherboard!
The problem is that both language translation and voice-to-text need a full understanding of the context. Any spoken language has so many different interpretations that it's useless to try automatic processing without full artificial intelligence. A classic example used in AI courses is "he saw that gasoline can explode". This sentence means either "he realized that it's possible for gasoline to explode" or "he watched a gasoline container as it blew up", one needs further examination of the context to know which meaning was intended.
A project that has tried to create a solution for this problem is Cyc, but it seems to be very far yet from realizing the original intent. Computers can do amazing things, but they still don't have the common sense of a four year old child.
They're going to run out of prefixes pretty quickly, since they're usually applied to powers of 1,000 rather than 2. And whatever happened to micro? milli (okay, mini), micro, nano, pico, femto, atto. I don't think there's anything past atto.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
that makes how many watts per square inch ?
... than just soldering on a bunch of SMT components?
I'm not going to use it for FPS or sth :')
I'm sure it could handle Quake II
Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
OK.... lets look at your claims and your gripes.
1) The C7 core runs a full speed in-order ALU and FPU. Unlike the C3, where design constraints required a half-speed FPU, this one has it at full speed. The ALU has a full 24 cycles to complete simply 32 bit operations (should only require 4 cycles, at best). Let's not even mention the 64KB 4-way associative L1 cache with only 3 cycle latency. Even at 1Ghz, this would indicate to me that the clock speed is not, in fact, ALU bound, but more likely FPU or L1 cache bound. Where did you get your ALU claim? It sounds made up to me.
2) The C7 core benchmarks show it to be about 40% slower, clock-for-clock than the new Celeron M. Presumably the ULV version may be a hair slower, leaving it at half the performance clock-for-clock. Considering that today's Celeron M is far better per clock than the original K8, it would lead me to believe that this chip would be roughly equivalent to a 500Mhz K8 processor, but using only about 1/10th of power.
This chip uses a 90nm SOI process, and VIA's process is up there with the best in the world. I'm not exactly sure what the basis for your gripe is...... except it sounds hollow.
Also, the (as you put it) "P4 escapades" are only one of many examples where clockspeed != performance. Take the old Intel 386SX or the AMD 486DX4-120 or the old AMD K6-2, which were all total dogs "per clock" compared to the much more efficient (at the time) 386DX, Pentium and Pentium 2.
Stew
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
All the connectors (power, USB, etc) are on the side. This works for traditional motherboards where the size of the connector is relatively insignificant, but in this case it seriously restricts the form factor. It looks small in the picture next to the phone, but imagine the wires attached. 3"x1.8" fits into a standard wall box, but not with the wires on the side. I think they need to stack the connectors on the surface of the MB to make this size viable as a standard.
Soon eight. No kidding.
Wow. Ain't progress fabulous?
Darn, that's for mid-2008 production according to engadget.
Verizon and Samsung jointly announced a 4GB MicroSDHC for May 1 2007 release, but I can't find it.
Anyway, performance on these systems will be more than sufficient for regular office work on Linux or as a thin client, and they'll support video up to 1080p (with add-on lvds daughter card of course). I believe the chipset supports SATA, though they don't show a connector on the device. Watts are ridiculously low (system: 14W Idle, 16W running Memtest!) It will be interesting to see what people do with them.
I'll have to buy a few to play with when they're available. I could have fun with this.
Gumstix is cute, but I'll take that x86 instruction set for ready applications and standard interfaces for readily available attachable goodies by preference.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You're just like a dumbass Woodrow Wilson.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
It's not clear whether VIA will make these tiny motherboards available to end users, or if they will only be sold directly to device makers
mini-itx.com are already taking pre-orders so presumablly via have said they are prepared to sell to them.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Hey, Google translate isn't perfect, but it's better than nothing. While the translation is usually a bit rough, it's a whole lot better than the French or German or Japanese I was looking at. And it doesn't take a supercomputer.
I agree with the grandparent post. Hearing a voice, figuring out the words and writing the translation on a screen would be a great application, even if it only got every third word right. How do I know this? Because in Spanish, I only get about every third word but I "get the gist" of the conversation. Surely a device like this could get above 33% pretty quickly.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Give me such a thing with 3 or 4 SATA-connectors (for a good or better RAID-array), 1 CF-disk-connector, 1 10/100/(1000) MBit ethernet port and optionally 1 serial port ans it would be my mini fileserver/NAS base of choice. A GHz and 512 Megs of RAM would be more than enough for an FTP-server and on or two p2p-clients and lot's of disk cache.
Is is water cooled?
but my 5 year old sony vaio picturebook is smaller than their "mini laptop". Its strange little 600 Mhz transmeta x86 cpu gave suprisingly good performance and it was a very power stingy notebook with a very small battery considering its runtime. It also weighs only 1.2 pounds... half a pound less.
I've tried via boards over the years and have been dissapointed by instablities in the DMA on the mini-itx's (causing random lockups), rediculously overpriced nano-itx, currently with pico-itx it seems impossible to find anyone who has any to sell even at the super high prices... It seems to take forever for VIA to release anything in quantity.
VIA just has a lot to prove to me this time around. In the mean time, if you want a tiny little form factor for your car pc or whatever, ebay a picturebook or 2. The last one I bought was cheaper than a bare nano-itx!
To boldly use to and too two times and get it right too! They're not gonna believe their eyes when they see it there!
Tech 1: Is that your new graphics card?
Tech 2: Pretty sweet huh?
Tech 1: It's Huge!!
tech 2: Well it needs to be, it's got 4 Cell processors and 4G of RAM on it, plus integrated Freon cooling system so I can keep it cool while overclocking it by up to 50 times.
Tech 1: Nice! Quake's gonna rock on that thing. What that little bit sticking out of the end?
Tech 2: Oh, that's my new motherboard.
Karma: Bad. (As in Good?)
How many PCI slots does it have?