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."

Comments

How big?

[thesolo]

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.

Re:How big?

[thesolo]

Business cards tends to vary between a few different sizes, usually depending on from which country the card came.

The international standard size is the same as a credit card, which is 85.6 mm x 53.98 mm. It's defined by ISO 7810, ID-1. Oddly enough, the US uses that sizing standard for its credit cards & drivers licenses, but not for business cards.

The business cards my Italian relatives have given me from Italy are always in a slightly different format than international size, they're instead 85 mm x 55 mm. Just slightly less wide and a slight bit taller than international size.

Re:while it's cool

[TheThiefMaster]

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 From TFA:

The mobile-ITX board that Chen demonstrated this morning appears to be based on a 1GHz "C7-S" processor -- apparently a standard Via C7-M shoe-horned into a 9 x 11mm package. The chip had not previously been announced. The mobile-ITX board also apparently uses an "S" (small) version of the CX700 integrated north-/south-bridge chipset. And, it appears to have an on-board DC-DC converter. Additionally, according to Via, the board includes a CDMA baseband processor chip, suggesting that the mobile-ITX board could be used as the basis for x86-compatible smartphones.

According to a brief item at EpiaCenter, Via's mobile-ITX board will be available with 256MB or 512MB of RAM soldered on-board, and will run Linux or Windows XP Embedded. Even an embedded version of Windows Vista may be too much for the little board, however, a Via spokesperson admits.

Re:Been around for a while...

[drinkypoo]

The fundamental problem with PC based motherboards has always been heat dissipation and interface connectors.

Various companies like Advantech have long sold expensive PC motherboards (sometimes with soldered cpu, sometimes socketed) that are dramatically smaller than the average. Most of the connectors are on headers, and you can use them or not, as you see fit. For example many people will never need serial or parallel connections - while others will never need USB. Their systems (the only ones I ever researched much) come in sizes ranging from PC/104 (which is to say, same size as a PC/104 card) to 5.25" storage device size (approx. footprint.) And some of them will run on automotive voltages, making a picopsu or similar unnecessary. But they are damned expensive! If VIA brings out a truly teensy motherboard it will fulfill a need I am currently experiencing - the need for a full PC that will fit into an ISO DIN slot. I have the entertainment system part in the car already, now I need the navigation/vehicle monitoring system to finish up, and I don't want to spend the $750+ it would take to get decent horsepower from one of the classic SBC-providing companies.

Re:Been around for a while...

[smellsofbikes]

>The fundamental problem with PC based motherboards has always been heat dissipation and interface connectors.

And the fundamental problem of things like gumstix is that they're very good for one specific function, the one for which they were designed, but if you want to do something outside that, you run into a wedding-cake-like pile of add-on cards to get the functionality you wanted. Take gumstix. I might be wrong, but my reading of their USB technical specifications says that this is a device intended to hook to a computer as a peripheral, not one capable of hooking to and controlling peripherals. I want to build remote surveillance devices that run on very low power (solar) for an off-the-grid house way up in the mountains, so I know what the weather's going to be like before I drive up. It'd also be really nice if it were small so I could stick it in the enclosure on the roof with the camera, and only have to run a phone line down, or wireless. Any PC-style system can run wireless and a USB webcam, but they're huge and power-hungry. Any small embedded processor device can fit in a tiny enclosure and run on 10W, but I have yet to find one that can run a webcam and send that video data out. So, for me, this sounds like a great bit of progress, although there are other ARM-based and x86-based very small computers that might also work. (and I might get my old Qube to do it, if I keep working at it...)

Re:powers of 1000, not 2

[JoeD]

atto = 10^-18

zepto = 10^-21

yocto = 10^-24

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

Re:on the issue of availibility

[loserMcloser]

mini-itx.com is taking pre-orders for the pico-ITX -- I don't see anywhere on the site where they are taking pre-orders for the mobile-ITX that the article is actually about.