Via will ship its long-awaited “SP” mini-ITX board in November, followed in early 2005 by a “DP” model with dual nanoBGA embedded processors — quite likely the world's first dual processor mini-ITX mobo. Both mini-ITX boards will feature a new northbridge supporting faster FSB (front-side bus), southbridge interconnect, and DDR memory speeds, and hardware MPEG-4 acceleration.

Via originally announced the SP board in late May. The SP will be the first Via mini-ITX board available with the CN400 northbridge.

New northbridge

The CN400 replaces the Via's venerable but slow CLE266. The CN400 supports FSB (front-side bus) speeds up to 200MHz, a 1GB/s southbridge interconnect, and the ability to address up to 8GB of DDR400/333/266 RAM. The CLE266 supports FSB speeds of only 133MHz, a 266MB/s southbridge interconnect, and support for only 1GB of DDR266 RAM.

Additionally, the CN400 supports hardware MPEG-4 acceleration.

Via's SP board, with CN400 northbridge, is due in November
(Click for larger view)
Dual-processor mini-ITX?

Dual-processor mini-ITX may seem like a four-wheel-drive Hyundai, but Via's DP board is likely to cost more than most of its other mini-ITX boards. The board will use two Eden ESP processors, which cost more because they are processed and tested for high-temperature, passively cooled embedded applications before being packaged in the more expensive 15 x 15mm nano-BGA (ball-grid array) package. The Eden chips boast a TDP (thermal design power) of 7 watts, or about half that of Via's C3 desktop chips, suggesting the new DP board should work fine with commodity mini-ITX power supplies. The new northbridge, built on a 0.15µm process, could save power compared to the CLE266, too.

Via platform marketing manager Tim Handley noted that Via may also ship a dual-processor board based on C3 chips.

The two smaller chips are the Eden ESP processors
The larger VIA chips are a CLE266 northbridge, to be replaced by the CN400 in the production version, which like the prototype will include the VT8237 southbridge pictured
(Click for larger view)

Backpanel I/O appears fairly basic on the DP board, compared to some Via mini-ITX boards, such as the MII 12000, which includes digital audio, firewire, and even CardBus PCMCIA and CompactFlash slots. On the prototype board, at least, I/O appears limited to:

• 6 USB ports (two on an onboard pin header)
• 10/100 and 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports
• PS/2 for keyboard and mouse
• Analog audio I/O
• Serial port

Back-panel I/O includes an onboard DVI connector
(Click to enlarge)

The DP prototype board eschews the DB-15 VGA port traditionally found on Via's motherboards in favor of a DVI port for use with flat-panel displays. However, DVI is backward-compatible with AGP, so perhaps a VGA port will be snuck in under the wire before the final version of the board reaches production “early next year.”

Four-way followups?

In addition to its sneak preview of the dual-processor mini-ITX board at the Fall Microprocessor Forum this week, Via also showed off a 1U rackmount-style case with two DP boards, creating a 4-way system. And, Via showed a quad-processor prototype board of non-standard dimensions featuring four nano-BGA processors. It was running an AES encryption benchmark under Windows Server 2003.

It appears that Via is preparing a few higher-powered, enterprise-oriented hardware designs in hopes that its PadLock Hardware and Software Security Suite can enable its inexpensive, commodity motherboards to migrate upward into higher margin markets. “We are speaking to a few server vendors about their requirements for low power processing solutions based on our CPU platforms,” confirmed Handley.

Additional photos of the prototype DP board are available here and here.

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