General Micro Systems is shipping what it claims is “absolutely the fastest” Mini-ITX motherboard. Powered by Pentium M processors at up to 2.3 GHz, the P620 Hawk is crammed with interfaces and expansion buses, and may also be the first Mini-ITX mobo to offer PMC expansion. It supports Linux, among other popular embedded and general purposes OSes.

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“The P620 provides the highest performance per watt of any single-board computer (SBC) on any platform on the market,” asserted Ben Sharfi, president of General Micro Systems.

Other views of the P620 and its optional enclosure
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Thanks to its use of Intel's low power Pentium processors, the P620 consumes as little as 6W and supports “notebook-style” power management facilities, according to the company. The board's ACPI-compatible power management support provides suspend-to-RAM capabilities, and power consumption can also be reduced during operation by dynamically varying the processor's clock frequency and core voltage. In standby mode, the self-throttling processor consumes less than 1W, according to GMS.

The company lists the following key features and specifications for the P620 Hawk:

• Processor — Field upgradable. Range of options including:
  • Low Voltage 1.0 GHz Pentium M Celeron (3W)
  • 2.3 GHz Pentium M (12W)
• Memory — 1 Gbyte of 266-MHz DDR SDRAM
• Display:
  • 2-channel video
  • 64 MB of video DRAM
  • Resolution up to 2048×1536 with 24-bit color
  • DVI-I connector supports either digital or RGB monitors
  • LVDS bus with backlight control
  • 4X AGP bus via PMC site
• Storage options:
  • 2 serial ATA (SATA) buses
  • 2 Ultra DMA-100 buses — supports onboard 1.8-inch hard drive or CompactFlash drive
• Expansion:
  • Card Bus (PCMCIA) — two Type-II or one Type-III device
  • 2 PCI-X-compliant PMC (PCI Mezzanine Card) sites
• I/O ports:
  • 2 Gigabit Ethernet with Boot and Wake-On-LAN support
  • 4 USB 2.0
  • 2 FireWire 1394-B (800Mbit/sec)
  • 2 RS232
  • 20 General Purpose I/O (GPIO) lines

Price and Availability

The P620 is available immediately from stock. Single quantity price is $1,800 with a 1.1 GHz CPU. In “OEM quantities,” the boards are priced from $850 each.

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