A Lifehacker article on building your own all-in-one PC (i.e. motherboard and display in one enclosure; I was surprised to see you can buy off-the-shelf enclosures for this) alerted me to the existence of a "thin" Mini-ITX motherboard form factor that Intel is promoting:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/hardware-developers/thin-mini-itx.html As far as I can tell, it is a mundane Mini-ITX motherboard (same height/width), with some attention paid to the height of the components, and it uses a laptop-style low-profile heatpipe cooler. It wasn't immediately obvious what the maximum height was and whether that rules out use of "stacked" I/O port connectors. They describe it as "approximately half the height of the standard IO shield." The way they present it it feels more like a loose set of principles rather than a specific standard. For CPUs it says they use i5, i7, and "and other Intel processors with a 65 Watt TDP in the LGA1155 package." An Intel "thin" board I found at Amazon came with an Atom CPU, which I don't think meets that spec. Up to 16 GB DDR3 1600 RAM. The board may support "full size PCI-Express mini-cards" or "half-size PCI-Express mini-cards", which can be used for "mSATA solid state drives, WiFi and third party TV Tuner modules." Some boards "may support a local flat panel display via onboard LVDS connectivity." They're pitching these for the aforementioned all-in-one PCs (and offer an instructional video on building one), home entertainment PCs, industrial uses, and just general small form-factor PCs. Oddly no mention of using them as micro-servers, though it looks like a good format for building a NAS, or perhaps a micro-cluster with a bunch stacked up bakers-rack-style. It would be interesting if someone made a variation of this form-factor that replaced the usual I/O shield with a single dock connector. Then you could plug a bunch into a backplane. This could work for the consumer applications, as it would allow the enclosure vendor to have much more flexibility in where they placed I/O connectors. And it would obviously be a win for the micro server market. So if you were looking to build your own (big) tablet or laptop, finding an off-the-shelf board, that you can plug an LCD into, just got easier. NewEgg doesn't have a form-factor category for this. Navigating to regular Mini-ITX boards and then searching for "thin" turns up nothing, but a search specifically for "thin mini-itx" in motherboards turns up an Elitegroup board that's discontinued: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813135313 Same search at Amazon turns up a few products: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&field-keywords=Thin%20Mini-ITX&index=blended&link_code=qs&sourceid=Mozilla-search&tag=wwwcanoniccom-20 All boards listed that actually mention "thin" are Intel made. Starting at $110 (w/Atom CPU), so there is a premium over commodity mini-ITX boards. (Anyone else notice that NewEgg seems to be losing its dominance in the area of computer parts? In several cases lately I've found products at Amazon that weren't at NewEgg, or had no reviews at NewEgg.) -Tom _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
