April 22nd, 2007 by ketyung
VIA Technologies, Inc, has been showing lots of effort to reduce its motherboard size. According to the history, they started from Mini-ITX form factor (17cmx17cm), then Nano (12cmx12cm) and now they’ve reached Pico-ITX. A Pico-ITX form factor mainboard, VIA VT6047, as shown in the picture below (slightly bigger than the size of a playing card), which is the latest, simply fits into palm of hand and it’s the world’s smallest currently.
The Pico-ITX mainboard measures only 10cm x 7.2cm, which is 75% smaller than the Mini-ITX. Surprisingly, with such a tiny size, there isn’t any sacrifice of any components on the board. It simply holds everything you need for your PC.
The move of producing motherboards of smaller sizes surely hints that the demand for smaller form factors of PC is getting more and more. VIA’s success of miniaturization depends a lot of its expertise at the silicon level such as handling power efficiency, thermal management and feature integration.
The VIA VT6047 Pico-ITX mainboard was designed to be powered by one of VIA’s energy efficient processor platforms, such as the VIA C7 or fanless VIA Eden processor in the 21mm x 21mm nanoBGA2 package, combined with feature-rich VIA system media processors to enable the board to pack a performance punch in a tiny, low heat, low power package.
via [AkihabaraNews]
VIA motherboard,Pico-ITX,Nano-ITX,Mini-ITX,Via Pico-ITX mainboard,Motherboard,PC motherboard,VIA,Computer hardware
Technorati Tags: VIA motherboard, Pico-ITX, Nano-ITX, Mini-ITX, Via Pico-ITX mainboard, Motherboard, PC motherboard, VIA, Computer hardware
June 3rd, 2007 at 7:03 am
[…] Still remember that VIA was gonna bring us the smallest motherboard in the world? VIA Technologies had introduced the smalltest form factor, Pico-ITX, which measures only 10cm x 7.2cm a few months ago. Here is the first product, the EPIA PX 10000 in VIA’s Pico-ITX line-up. Mini-ITX.com has done a review for this smallest mainboard in the world. No doubt, its small size and quietness are definitely good for those UMPCs, systems and appliances. But not for those needing high-defination video output. This mainboard will fail if you expect it to power a high-def mini media box, due to the limitation of its 1GHZ CPU, which isn’t capable of running any popular video formats at an acceptable rate above 1024×768. Another short is it fails to work well with Linux, which you’re simply hard to find any compatible drivers for Linux. VIA needs to look into this to produce better support for Linux such as providing a central repository of drivers and also better documentation. This smalltest mainboard also fails to attract manufacturers to produce cases for it, which is mainly due to its limited market. Read more about the review here. […]