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Via's teeny tiny Mobile-ITX EPIA-T700 system board demonstrated twice (video)
We've been hearing of Via's Mobile-ITX technology for quite some time now, but it only became officially official last month and now we're seeing the thing in the silicon for the first time. The company has put together a little demo video that we've included below, showing off its minuscule 6cm x 6cm system board, about half the size of a Pico-ITX. But, there are two problems. The first is that this current Mobile-ITX board (the EPIA-T700) has no I/O connectors on it, meaning it must be mounted onto a larger carrier board if you want to do anything with it -- but hopefully that can be integrated into mobile devices and shrunk. The second problem? That the presenter flubbed the demonstration and someone forgot to edit the first take out of the video. See the frustration for yourself at the 1:15 mark after the break.
VIA's Mobile-ITX platform is half as big as Pico-ITX, still full of heart
VIA's Pico-ITX platform took things to an entirely new level a few years back, and now the company is introducing an even smaller variant for even more minuscule applications. The Mobile-ITX specification measures in at just 6cm x 6cm, or right around 50 percent as large as the aforementioned Pico-ITX form factor. Aimed specifically at next-generation embedded devices that are barely visible to the naked eye, Mobile-ITX employs a modularized design that includes a CPU module card and an I/O carrier board. We're told that CPU modules based on the Mobile-ITX form factor integrate "core CPU, chipset and memory functionality and I/O that includes the CRT, DVP and TTL display support, HD Audio, IDE, USB 2.0, as well as PCI Express, SMBus, GPIO, LPC, SDIO and PS2 signals," and the 5-watt power usage means that these are well suited for always-on systems. Look for the first commercial Mobile-ITX-based CPU module to ship in Q1 2010.
MTube does Linux, WiMAX, weighs five ounces
Check out the MTube. Sure, the name is weird and maybe a little pointless, but the device itself is pretty interesting. We don't have a ton of detail on the little guy -- which was put together by Taiwan's Science and Technology Advisory Group -- except that it's built atop VIA's Mobile-ITX motherboard, features a 2.8-inch, 640 x 480 touchscreen, 8GB of flash memory, a 1GHz VIA CPU, and is running some form of Linux. The new, miniscule ITX form factor apparently also includes a CDMA baseband chip, which opens up wireless connectivity possibilities for devices of this type. Right now this is just a prototype, but production is planned for 2009, and once VIA's credit-card sized motherboard hits the market, we suspect we'll be seeing all kinds of new gadgetry like this popping up.[Via jkOnTheRun]
