VIA Intros 'World's First' Pico-ITX Motherboard with a Dual-Core CPU

VIA keeps on releasing new mainboards using the company's processors and their latest creation, the VIA EPIA-P900 Pico-ITX, is touted as being the world's first Pico-ITX solution to feature a dual-core CPU.

The ultra compact Pico-ITX form factor measures only 10cm x 7.2cm, but despite this compact size VIA has manged to fit in the EPIA-P900 an 1.0GHz EdenTM X2 processor and the VIA VX900H chipset.

This media system hub, as VIA likes calling it, sports hardware acceleration support for various HD video formats, including MPEG-2, H.264, VC-1, WMV9 and HDCP for Blu-ray content.

The EPIA-P900 mainboard also sports support for up to 4GB of system memory via a single SO-DIMM socket and also features a pair of SATA 3Gps ports.

Throughout the board PCB, VIA has also placed various other headers for a 24-bit LVDS interface, five USB 2.0 ports, an LPC connector, a SMBus connector and two UART ports.

The rest of the required ports and connectors are spread around the sides of the EPIA-P900 and these include HDMI and VGA video outputs, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and a pair of USB 2.0 ports.

Audio is driven by a VIA Vinyl VT2021 10-channel audio codec, which delivers support for Blu-ray and HD DVD Audio Content Protection.

"The VIA Pico-ITX allows embedded system design to pack unprecedented levels of performance into even smaller form factors," said Epan Wu Head of the VIA Embedded Platform Division, VIA Technologies, Inc.

"The new VIA EPIA-P900 opens up exciting new possibilities for innovation in ultra compact embedded designs," concluded the company's rep.

VIA hasn't revealed any information regarding the release or the pricing of the EPIA-P900 motherboard, but this is expected to be sold only to system integrators and OEMs.

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