VIA appears to be keeping them coming, releasing motherboards one after another. After announcing the first Nano processor-based product earlier this week, the company has just introduced the Pico-ITXe board, which comes with stackable I/O Expansion. As with the VB80001, the new motherboard has also been showcased at the Embedded Systems Conference, Boston, Massachusetts. The VIA EPIA-P710 has been designed to meet the specifications of the Small Form Factor Special Interest Group (SFF-SIG), providing a more rational approach to system design.
"VIA is excited to be the first to deliver a truly innovative product that leverages the ultra compact dimensions and modular expandability of the new Pico-ITXe specification," said Daniel Wu, vice president of VIA Embedded, VIA Technologies, Inc. "Our collaboration with SFF-SIG has borne a product that will set the standard for the embedded industry and shape the market for years to come."
The new board comes with four customizable I/O expansion modules, enabling a more flexible and affordable implementation of serial connectivity options. Also, the EPIA-P710 board comes with two SUMIT (Stackable Unified Module Interconnect Technology) connectors that integrate PCI Express, LPC, SPI and USB 2.0, as well as other common high and low speed, legacy and serial expansion buses.Other specifications include an integrated 1GHz VIA C7 processor and the company's VIA VX800 media system processor, both meant to deliver a fully-featured, flexible and power-efficient platform that comes in a small form factor of only 10cm by 7.2cm.
The integrated VX800 media processor of the board features the VIA Chrome 9 IGP, which provides support for DirectX 9 graphics and MPEG-2/4, WMV9 and VC1 video decoding acceleration. In addition, the board also supports up to 2GB of DDR2 memory, one IDE channel, two SATA channels and the VIA Vinyl HD Audio.
The company said that its new EPIA-P700 Pico-ITXe board would ship in December 2008.