Are you a small PC fetishist? I sure am. That’s why we’re proud to give away two red hot ARTiGO Pico-ITX PCs with hard drives. What can you do with them? Well, they’re very small…
Have fun building your own portable PC. The VIA ARTiGO Pico-ITX Builder Kit is designed to help DIY enthusiasts utilize all the features of the ultra compact, versatile VIA Pico-ITX mainboard.
The VIA ARTiGO Pico-ITX Builder Kit A1000 includes a 1GHz VIA EPIA Pico-ITX mainboard, compact Pico-ITX form factor chassis, power adapter and accessories.
How do you win?
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VIA has been so kind as to give us one red-hot Iceman PC. What is an Iceman?
Fanless and ventless, the VIA iceman excels in harsh environments where others fail. Engineered to be dust, rain and splash resistant, the iceman is suitable for both indoor and outdoor locations. Fulfilling all your media needs through integrated hardware MPEG-2 decoding acceleration, the iceman serves an almost endless range of deployment possibilities, from outdoor digital signage to industrial computing applications and much more.
Dude. You can put this PC in your mud wrestling pen. The ladies and/or men can surf the web while vying for a brand new Bob’s Golden Rodeo t-shirt. Can this get any better?
Looks like the motherboard business has lost its luster for VIA. Custom PC is reporting that VIA "sees no future in making chipsets for third parties such as Intel and AMD."
A VIA rep said that one of the main reasons the company moved into the processor business was because it saw the third-party chipset business becoming less important against providing a complete all-in-one platform.
This move is a little surprising as VIA has been a pretty big player in the motherboard market but we’re seeing more and more complete platform offerings nowadays, so the tides seem to be turning. There are still plenty of third-party motherboard manufacturers to pick up the slack, although it’s interesting to see some of those companies getting into building things like netbooks — companies like ASUS, Gigabyte, and MSI come to mind.
[via Slashdot]
We’re all hearing a lot about Intel’s Atom range of processors these days, likely because of the tiny laptop revolution (or whatever you want to call it). While VIA’s Nano is not competing directly with Atom as, say, GeForce does with Radeon, they are in the same ballpark and when it comes to low-power, general-purpose setups for things like tiny laptops or tablets, people are going to talk about Nano and Atom as competitors. HardOCP took a look at the two to see how they’d do in various situations.
With a bare bones setup (just a compatible mini motherboard and a gig of RAM) they compared the two in both synthetic and real-world applications. Intel’s been ruling the CPU roost these days so it came as a surprise to me when their touted Atom platform got its ass handed to it by pretty much every measure. Pure number crunching, desktop environment, video encoding, it got whupped pretty much all over town. These were essentially desktop setups and it’s difficult to extend the testing to the market, where demands on the systems are so varied. But it’s fun to know that Intel is getting schooled somewhere.
It’s not exactly a revolution in computing, but the fact that the game appears somewhat playable on a setup with such a small form factor is nice. They’ve got a PCI Express x16 slot for the GeForce card they’re using, and the Nano processor seems to be pulling its weight nicely as well. The idea, I think, is that basically you’ve got nearly every benefit of a larger form factor but obviously in a much smaller package.
Skip to about the 2 minute mark to see the game actually being played. [via TechnoVoyance]
Contract OEM “leaked” a Sony version of Via’s “open source” laptop running a 1.6GHz C7-M processor. It seems that IDG walked up to one of their laptops at WiMax Expo in Taipei and opened the system properties.
A check of the laptop’s properties confirmed the laptop is based on a 1.6GHz C7-M processor from Via and listed Sony as the manufacturer. When the existence of Sony’s name on the machine was pointed out to a Quanta executive manning the booth, he quickly closed the properties window and declined to explain why Sony was listed as the manufacturer.
Classy, Taipei! I wish the folks manning these booths understand that the old rule of “Don’t touch our shizz” is no longer applicable.
VIA’s 64-bit “Isaiah” processor, which we’ve reported here and here, has now been made official, taking on the “Nano” moniker. The chip uses a 65-nanometer process, measures 21mm x 21mm, and uses the same socket as existing VIA C7 processors, which should make things easier on OEMs. It’s being pitched for more mainstream desktop and laptop platforms, squaring off against Intel and AMD.
“In particular, the VIA Nano processor places significant emphasis on high-performance floating-point execution, using a completely new algorithm for floating-point adds that results in the lowest floating-point add latency of any x86 processor. Similarly, the floating-point multiplier has the lowest latency of any x86 processor.
In practical terms, this means the VIA Nano processor provides exceptionally smooth play back of Blu-ray Disc™ and other HD video formats, which can have encrypted media streams of up to 40Mbps, in addition to its robust two-clock FPU multiply and 128 bit data path offering an excellent gaming experience, providing silky smooth rendering of 3D images.”
Clock speeds range from 1.0GHz to 1.8GHz, so it won’t eat into premium offerings from Intel and AMD, but it might be able to take a chunk out of the lower-end stuff.
More info here.
Do you own a small fabricating plant in Taiwan? Do you have an engineering team of ten PhDs? Do you want to make small laptops? Has VIA got a deal for you. The VIA OpenBook reference design is not actually a product — it’s more of an idea. Because it is ostensibly open (the CAD plans are available on the VIAOpenBook site) you simply buy the chips from VIA and use the plans to build your own cases, keyboards, and I/O systems. What does this mean to you and me? Not much, unless we want to mill our own laptop parts out of plastic.
VIA isn’t really selling anything here other than its own motherboards and chips. The laptop portion is a bit of lip service to openness that corporations like to pay just to get their piece of the “open” mindshare. While the potential is there — mini laptops with powerful features hand-crafted by Cuban virgins out of sandalwood and jade come to mind — let’s just call this an advertisement for a mobile computing platform and leave it at that.
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They were still taking bets when I heard about this about a week ago, but now the challenge has begun. For those of you not in the know, Technovoyance and VIA doing a stunt right now where they’re running this super-efficient little Pico-ITX chipset with no fans, no heatsink or anything until it croaks. They took bets from people on how long it would go with the prize being a build kit of said chipset.
They’ve got Ubuntu 8.04 on there and they’re looping an mp4 video to tax the processor and video card. Unfortunately it’s a VIA demo of the chipset, and not something interesting like, say, “Never gonna give you up.” In any case, the live stream is here so you can keep an eye on it. I’m guessing it’s going to go a good long time before crapping out.; we’ll keep you posted.
Look out Intel and AMD, there’s a new kid on the block. He comes from the wrong side of the tracks, kicked out of his former school for staying out at recess long after the bell rang. His name’s Isaiah and he’s gunning for the both of you.
Something like that, anyway. The Isaiah chip by VIA will be here later this month and will be aimed at regular notebooks and desktops. VIA’s C7 processor has been somewhat popular with lower-end notebooks and things like fanless media center PCs and car PCs. The Isaiah chip, though, will be interesting to watch, as VIA’s formed a partnership with NVIDIA for an embedded platform that costs less than $50 but is capable of running Vista.
via CNET
VIA has a new motherboard with an embedded 500MHz VIA Eden ultra low voltage processor (it runs at one watt). The board is called the VIA EPIA PX500EG and, in order to show off its cooling abilities — even sans fan — VIA Arena is hosting the Naked Pico Challenge, where it’ll run a system loaded with Ubuntu and playing an MPEG-4 video continuously until it dies. Oh, and the heatsink will be removed from the processor.
You can enter the competition by guessing how long the system will last without crashing. Apparently, VIA thinks it’ll crash before the 28th of May, as that’s the day the competition ends. The prize is a VIA ARTiGO builder kit. Pretty nice.
via TechnoVoyance
Two new Mini-ITX motherboards from Intel have been recently spotted — the Eklo and the Fly Creek. The Mini-ITX segment has been long populated by Via and its C7 line of processors, which have catered to small form factor system builders, but Intel appears to be eyeing the low-cost, tiny desktop market as well.
The Fly Creek motherboard can apparently support Intel’s GMA X3500 graphics chipset, which is somewhat powerful at up to 384MB of video memory, DirectX 10, and OpenGL 2.0 support. Via hasn’t been sitting on its hands, though, as it’s joined up with NVIDIA to offer the Via CN+GeForce platform, with support for DirectX 10, Vista, and Blu-ray HD for under $45.
Whatever the case may be, we’ll likely be seeing more and more small-but-powerful computer systems over the coming months as this area heats up. Cheap, too.
via Crave
HP’s the latest computer maker to jump on the netbook bandwagon. (Netbooks, of course, are those super small laptops only good for things like surfing the Web and checking e-mail. They’ll be big in the cash-strapped education market.) Its Mini-Note, which should go on sale later this month, is powered by one of those Via processors we’ve been hearing a little about lately.
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The graphics giant and the chipset maker are going to be working together just as Via is launching a competitor to Intel’s Atom chipset. The Isaiah chip is tiny and low-power, providing an excellent alternative to Atom for smaller form factors like UMPCs and small laptops. Nobody knows exactly what the terms are on this agreement because Via and Nvidia are being hush about it. Not sure why, it seems like something you might want to, you know, get out there.
Via is going to release 64-bit chips that “provide double the performance of the company’s current chips but consume the same amount of power,” according to CNET. The dual-core chips will run at 2GHz and are being marketed under the “Isaiah” moniker.
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I caught word from the VIA rep at CES that Everex would be offering a 7-inch Linux-based notebook at Walmart and then Nicholas followed up with the official word. Now we’re hearing that Everex will follow the 7-inch version (shown above) up with a 9-inch version some time in June and will aim to keep it under $500.
The 7-inch version will cost $399 so it might be safe to say that the 9-inch version will cost $499, in which case we’ll get into discussions like, “Why would I buy this when I can get an 8-pound Dell with Windows and a bunch of other stuff for $499?” Asus also plans to release 8- and 9-inch versions of its Eee PC by the middle of the year too and it looks like Acer’s getting in on the fun as well..
Exciting stuff on the horizon, folks. As Natalie Merchant always said, “These are the days we’ll remember, my friends.” She’s so wise. Also, she looks like my Aunt Jane.
Everex to make CloudBook UMPC with 9-in. LCD [Computerworld]
Next to Everex’s Eee-killer, they had another product, more a prototype than anything, but with a similar form factor. This one has its baby touchpad in a more traditional spot, which made it look even more lonely and puny. It truly is only about as big as your “tab” key, though it works surprisingly well.
I found the VIA table last night, tucked way back in a corner and found out that Everex will begin selling an ultraportable Linux-based notebook similar to the one shown here. This one is from Packard Bell and runs XP — currently being sold in Europe — but the one we’ll be getting in the US within the next week or so will be manufactured by Everex and will run Linux. It’ll cost $399, too.
The processor is a VIA C7-M running at 1.2GHZ, there’s a gigabyte of RAM, a 30-gigabyte hard drive, almost four hours of battery life, 7-inch screen (not a touchscreen) and, get this, DVI out instead of 15-pin VGA out. I came back to this table three or four times throughout the night and I’m excited to see what Everex is able to do with it.
Well look at this little peanut. It’s the ARTiGO kit from VIA. It’ll set you back $300 and includes a VIA C7 1GHz processor, 4 USB 2.0 ports, integrated audio and video with VGA output, support for up to 1GB of DDR2 memory and 2.5-inch hard drive, and weighs 1.14 pounds.
You’ll have to bring your own operating system (not compatible with Vista), RAM, hard drive, keyboard, mouse, and monitor. The whole setup is fanless and tiny, so it might make a good second or third computer and I bet we’ll see this integrated into cars very soon. At 5.9"(W) x 4.3"(L) x 1.8"(H), it’d fit quite nicely into your standard DIN slot (with a little room to spare) if I’m not mistaken.
VIA ARTiGO Pico-ITX Builder Kit A1000 [VIA] via PC World
Ah VIA. Thanks for shrinking computers. Your latest VESA-mounted PC makes me smile.
Once used for commercial displays, VIA will be releasing a consumer version of a PC that can be attached to the back of any standard LCD monitor. So if space is at a premium or you just want to amaze your friends, this could be right up your alley.
It’s available in 1.0GHZ and 1.5GHZ VIA Eden ULV chipsets, no fans, built-in wireless, VGA and DVI ports, S-Video out, 4 USB, Gigabit Ethernet, and a laptop or flash-based hard drive. Perfect for a gigantic-screen Car PC or, hell, mount one in the bathroom.
Pricing and availability not yet set. I’d expect it to be somewhat affordable, though, coming from VIA. Like well under $1000, affordable.
Introducing the VIA VESA Mounted PC [Technovoyance.com]
