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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."
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.
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).
What the processor doesn't suck is power. Low power consumption FTW!
It must have some, but they haven't figured out how much. But you're right, if it doesn't have a slot, it's pointless.
Has a DC-DC power supply, so luckily, all it needs is the battery. Batteries are getting pretty small these days.
This IS the mobo, memory, and psu. It probably has onboard flash, and if it doesn't already, it will almost certainly have some type of SD slot.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'd like to point out that a 500MHz AMD K8 is capable of way more MIPS [and FLOPS] than a 1GHz C7 core.
Clockrate != performance or did Intel's P4 escapades not teach you anything?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
No it couldn't - it uses far too much power and makes far too much heat (the fact it needs a heat spreader is a dead giveaway - a mobile phone device must be efficient enough not to need to dissipate heat at all).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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.
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.