About a year ago VIA announced their "APC 8750, A $50 Android PC": http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00336.html
Just recently they announced the "VAB-600 Pico-ITX" board: http://liliputing.com/2013/05/via-launches-vab-600-pico-itx-board-with-a-wm8950-cpu.html VIA has introduced a new board which you can use to build a low-power, small form-factor PC or embedded device. The VAB-600 is a Pico-ITX board which measures just 3.9´´ x 2.8´´ and which features an 800 MHz VIA Wondermedia WM8950 ARM Cortex-A9 processor with Mali-400 graphics. ...the board includes 1GB of built-in RAM and 4GB of storage, and should be able to handle Google Android or basic Linux applications. The board features a USB 2.0 port, two mini USB ports, GPIO pins, a mini PCIe slot, an Ethernet jack, and optional support for a touchscreen, SIM card, 3G, or WiFi. Is this VIA's first foray into ARM CPUs? It was never clear to me whether last year's APC 8750 used an ARM CPU or one of VIA's older x86 designs. (That it came with Android leans in the ARM direction, but there are x86 versions of Android.) That CPU seems to be slow by todays standards, given you can get $40 sticks with higher clock rates, if not multiple cores. No pricing info. The author notes it hasn't shown up in VIA's online store yet. Out of curiosity I followed the link anyway, and ran across the VE-900 mini-ITX board for $90: http://store.viatech.com/protected/product/frontProductDetail.action?id=9420 which hey label as "NEW!" but link to this review from December 2011: http://www.bioslevel.com/v/review/VIA_VE900_MiniITX_Mainboard/1 Is their store that stale? The review says: Powering the VE-900 is Via's own dual-core Nano X2 processor clocked in 1.4GHz. The Nano X2 is Via's first 64-bit dual-core processor, and it is meant to compete against Intel's Atom CPUs in both performance and power consumption. ... The VE-900 also houses Via's latest VX900 chipset, allowing this board to support up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and provide excellent hardware acceleration for the latest video formats in resolutions up to 1080p. ... Via has been very friendly with the Linux community in the past, and most of their products tend to work in Linux out-of-the-box. ... The VE-900 held its own ground in our SuperPi testing, beating a desktop-class 64-bit single-core CPU with a higher clock frequency. ... Again, the VE-900's Nano X2 holds up against the Atom. The question no one thinks about when it comes to computing power deals with who's going to pay the electricity bill. Unless you're playing the latest 3D games on your HDTV, there's little need to purchase multi-core CPUs and dual-bay videocards. I was impressed while monitoring the VE-900's power consumption through these tests. Via manages to pull ahead of Intel again. While idle, the VE-900 uses nearly 50% less power than the Atom-based system. Considering the Netbook and Desktop-class Atoms can sometimes use as much power as early dual-core processors, the VE-900's power consumption is even more impressive. It never says explicitly here, but I can assume from the Atom comparisons that this is indeed an x86 CPU. Notably the board has two SATA ports on it. No mention of the chipset used, but if this thing is really over a year old, no doubt some Linux user has posted the results of lspci. I could see this appealing to both the D-I-Y NAS market as well as set-top-box media player market. So why haven't we heard more about this board? Is the performance not as good as this review's benchmarks would suggest? I did a search at Amazon and NewEgg to see what end-user reviews said. Found it at Amazon, but no reviews. Not found at NewEgg. -Tom _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
