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Not nano, pico |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Monday, 23 April 2007 |
VIA Technologies keeps getting smaller. They call this tiny motherboard
their pico-ITX form factor. It measures just 3.94 inches by 2.83 inches
deep. That is half the size of their previous smallest "nano-ITX"
motherboard.
The Mini-ITX form factor was a whopping 17cm square and we thought that
was small, even the pico's Nano-ITX predecessor form factor starts to
look pretty big at 12cm when you see the dimensions of the Pico-ITX. At
10cm x 7.2cm that's half the surface area of the Nano-ITX.
As Richard Brown, Vice President of Corporate Marketing, VIA Technologies,
Inc. says the VIA VT6047 Pico-ITX fires the imagination allowing us to dream of n almost
unlimited range of what were previously impossibly small systems.
At the moment it is only a reference
design, so we may never actually see this put into a product form, but
it shows what is possible in terms of ultra-mobile computing platforms.
The
company has said it will announce a commercial version of the Pico-ITX
in May 2007 (next month). So we could see systems based on this before
the end of the year if vendors are attracted to the idea.
Just to be clear this is a fully featured x86 implementation just like
your desktop PC. This motherboard is designed for Ultra Mobile Personal
Computer (UMPC) systems and potentially embedded in other appliances.
The motherboards are designed to run Via's C-7 and Eden
microprocessors (which are clone Intel CPUs) and uses the Via VX700
chip rather than a two piece chipset to save space. The motherboard has
only a single memory slot but that can carry up to
1GB of DDR2 RAM.
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