Via Now Shipping Dual-Processor Mini-ITX Board 304
An anonymous reader writes "Via is now shipping its first dual-processor mini-ITX board. The DP-310 features two 1GHz processors, gigabit Ethernet, support for SATA drives, and a media-processing graphics chipset. It targets high-density applications -- according to Via, a 42-U rack with 168 processors would draw about 2.5 kilowatts, or about as much power as two hair dryers." This also looks like the basis for a nice car computer. Also on the small-computing front, an anonymous reader submits "General Micro, meanwhile, last week released what it calls the world's fastest mini-ITX board, powered by a Pentium M clocked up to 2.3GHz. "
Dual-processor car computer? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you need a car computer with dual processors?
Industry Change (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why both SATA and ATA-133 (Score:2, Insightful)
Go find me a SATA 2.5'' hard disk please
Re:Why both SATA and ATA-133 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Car computer? (Score:3, Insightful)
How much speed is enough? (Score:4, Insightful)
Useable? Yes. Acceptable for generic web browsing and word processing? Maybe. An excellent-performing midrange desktop replacement? No way.
The benchmark [overclockers.com.au] you linked said the single processor handled dvd playback flawlessly, and played divx movies "perfectly with no slowdowns or stutters"
Their conclusion:
"VIA has definitely listened to the users of the EPIA on this one. They've fixed up all of the major problems that stopped the EPIA becoming a perfect TV-Run machine. Anyone who is looking to set up a dedicated TV-Run machine should look no further than the VIA EPIA-M - its high quality DVD and DivX playback make it a perfect choice!"
That sounds fast enough to replace many home desktops
Re:How much speed is enough? (Score:4, Insightful)
You're overlooking the bit that the chipset has mpeg hardware acceleration. How fast it decoded dvds has nothing to do with the overall system performance. These boxes are generally SLOW. They have hardware acceleration that does in fact make them cool for DVR applications, but that has nothing to do with using it as a desktop system.
Re:How much speed is enough? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Car computer? (Score:3, Insightful)
yes it means you can do multiple tasks simultaneously. but on a via eden, each task is _really_ slow. so you can do a bunch very slow tasks simultaneously. woo fucking hoo.
yes, it's better than a single cpu eden, but the responsiveness of a dual cpu eden will still be much, much slower than a single processor athlon or pentium-m.
Re:Why does this thing STILL have PS/2 ports? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why does this thing STILL have PS/2 ports? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why does this thing STILL have PS/2 ports? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Car computer? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How much speed is enough? works good for PVR (Score:5, Insightful)
512MB PC2100 DDR ram, 120+160GB IDE hard drives, Hauppage PVR250 tv-tuner PCI card, 90W power supply (used to be a 60W until I added the 2nd hard drive).
For a system that can handle recording, pausing live TV, video editing, DVD burning, and yes, even WEB BROWSING, text editing, minor picture manipulation and instant messaging, I highly prefer my little shoebox sized system to some power-hungry behemoth that sounds like 747 at takeoff.
I don't use Photoshop or modern 3D gaming on it, because I wouldn't use those period. I normally use the free utilities that come with WinXP and Pinnacle Studio that came with my DVD burner for video editing, because they are all I need. If I really want to screw around with something, I'll usually try running it first on my 450MHz K6-2+ WinME box (which, for reference, IS much slower than my mini-itx system) so I won't risk messing up my properly functional PVR setup.
If someone can build an equivalent system using modern Intel/AMD processors that requires only 2 small fans (40mm on the processor, 60mm case fan), and can operate flawlessly off of a 90W power supply, I'd like to see it (and hear it).
Mini-ITX, at least Via's approach, is not about cramming the most powerful components into a new motherboard form factor. It's about creating a platform that has enough capabilities and utilizes the smallest amount of resources (power, space) to get it done.
For those of us who keep our systems on 24/7 in our bedrooms, low power/noise are a critical factor in deciding our computing platform. I'm thankful to Via for pushing along in the low power/density arena.
Re:Car computer? (Score:3, Insightful)
I had a PII 400, it could play winamp, while surfing the web, with a copy of outlook, trillian, and word open in Windows 2000. (It did have 512mb of ram)
Windows XP is full of bloat, live OS backups, live OS file protection, background automatic patches, the look and feel service to make your menus pretty, all the drm hooks, dumprep to catch your programs crashing and give you meaning to the madness. I'm not saying all these things aren't usefull, just that they don't directly contribute to the music listening, web browsing, productivity portion of my day and I don't need them to make my pc more workable.
Bloat is nothing new and it's definately not just usability increases. As PCs get faster, deveopers stop worrying about efficency and pay more attention to deadlines. I keep my OS on it's own partition so it has less of a chance of screwing up my data. The OS partition on my windows machine constantly runs out of space, it's 4GB! You might be thinking, so what, you have an 80GB hardrive, but where does it end. When I have a 1TB hard drive, it windows just going to stop deleting anything. They've not gone through significant pains to compress service pack files or archived dlls. (think diskspace or stacker ppl) There's nothing in XP they couldn't be doing in half the space, at four times the speed, it's just not necessary for them to do it that quickly or that efficiently because people keep buying new hardware so they settle for getting it on the shelf faster.
So if I see all this inherant waste, why would I run XP? I have XP purely to keep up with the times. (Since I have to support XP/2003 stations/servers, a little Gaming doesn't hurt either). If I could get away with it, I'd keep linux on everything running ICE-WM. Let the hardware advance to run the lastest 3d game or rendering package. Why should my operating system be more resource intensive than my applications? Isn't it's whole purpose to let me run my apps?
XP does appear to be reasonably stable, and generally causes me less maintenance time per week, but if I wanted to run on a slower machine, there's aboslutely no reason I couldn't drop back just a little and still get everything done as quickly today as I did in '99. (and as quickly if not faster than I can today)
Honestly save playing 3d games, and real time video encoding there's not a lot that a dual 1GHz box can't do. I had a 400MHz celeron laptop that did a bang up job playing DVD's. (though it's battery died at around 100 minutes with all the stress)
As a side note, The breaking point I found for running winamp 2.x (pre directX 8) in the background was 100MHz pentium I. A pentium 100 could handle mp3 and a web browser, the 75 would break up a little-> a lot in most apps. (windows 95, 64mb ram)
Re:How much speed is enough? works good for PVR (Score:2, Insightful)
It is up to YOU, do you want to be depended on those countries for your life style? If not, stop thinking about the few (tens) of bucks you pay per month for gass or electricity and think about where that energy is coming from.
For example switch of your home server and let your web server be provided by an ISP where you can have a more efficient use of the cpu/energy. Many do ofer mysql and other nice to have tools too.
Buy a car that has a milage of 30 mpg or better. There is really no use of a car that consume more than that. Why do you need 200+ horse power, while that speed limit is 65mph anyway? My 130hp can do 120mph easily and not consume more than 15mpg at that speed. At a more normal speed it uses 30mpg. (if you want to know it is a 2.2 liter turbo (HDI) diesel) And I still have about the same room inside as I used to have in my Explorer.
I can improve on many things myself, and I will. In short, think about where the energy is coming from and if you want to depend on that. And I even did not start about the environment, there I know many people do not care about that....[/rant]