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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."
...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
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
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.
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.
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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.'"
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