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Moore's Law for Motherboards

Posted by Zonk on from the soon-they'll-be-skull-implantable dept.

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."

6 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Cool by KnowledgeKeeper · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Cool by DrunkenTerror · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You're never getting laid.

  2. Re:while it's cool by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    VIA processors are not known for their serious ALU performance. Granted it's cool that it has ram, but the processor sucks.

    What the processor doesn't suck is power. Low power consumption FTW!

    What about flash storage?

    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.

    And there still isn't power, a battery or AC adapter would add to the size don't you think?

    Has a DC-DC power supply, so luckily, all it needs is the battery. Batteries are getting pretty small these days.

    I mean my computer is no bigger than an a couple inches square. That is if you disregard the mobo, memory, PSU, case, disk drives, etc...

    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.'"
  3. Re:while it's cool by tomstdenis · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.
  4. Re:Next iPhone board? by Alioth · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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
  5. still impossible for supercomputers by mangu · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I wish we had *any* computer today that could do the things you mention, if it cannot be done in a supercomputer forget about the handheld thingies.


    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.