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May 05 2008

jabancroftlinkblog
13:50

Intel Atom headed for miniature motherboards: perfect for homebrew gaming consoles?

Wonder: tiny motherboards from Via Technologies which fit inside anything from bottles of whisky to hollowed-out books. Dismay: They're not very powerful and tend to be sold to the people who make cash registers. Refresher: Intel's Atom and Via's Isaiah high-performance, low-power chips to be added to Mini-ITX 'boards.


"With Intel restricting its Atom processor to only be used with mini-ITX-based motherboards, mini-ITX chassis are expected to see a surge in demand in June, according to sources in the channel. ... In order to make a clear separation between nettop products and traditional entry-level PCs, Intel only allows Atom processors to be used with mini-ITX motherboards, limiting the platform with a lack of PCI Express and only a single DIMM slot for up to 2GB DDR2 memory."

It's not really clear to me if the "limitation" here is really a specified restriction from Intel or merely inherent to the small motherboards' lack of features. A company called Arbor, for example, makes a Mini-ITX motherboard with a PCI-Express x16 slot--let's see if it's got plans for an upgrade.

Intel Atom to boost mini-ITX chassis [DigiTimes]