VIA Debuts Tiny C3-Based Nano-ITX System Boards

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

After months of rumors among the Mini-ITX subculture, Taiwanese X86 chip, chipset, and motherboard maker VIA Technologies has announced yet a smaller form factor system board called the Nano-ITX, which includes all of the major system components needed for a media PC or embedded server--all crammed into a square board that is only 12 centimeters (4.7 inches) on a side.

The Mini-ITX form factor, which is based on a square system board that measures 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) on a side, has caught on among tinkerers in the PC market because it is based on the low-power line of C3 and Eden processors that VIA Technologies obtained through its acquisition of chipmaker Cyrix from National Semiconductor in September 1999. National Semiconductor bought Cyrix to try to foster the entry PC market (specifically, sub-$1,000 PCs with dreams of the sub-$500 PC), but it gave up on the business after owning Cyrix for only two years. Here it is, five years later, and reasonably powerful Mini-ITX boards are so inexpensive that people are building their own baby servers and putting PCs inside cigar boxes, lunch boxes, and other weird places. The speed of C3 processors ranges from 600 MHz to 1 GHz, but they consume very little power and generate very little heat, which means they can run fanless or with very small fans that are nearly silent. The Mini-ITX and Nano-ITX boards have built-in serial, parallel, LAN, and other ports that a modern PC and server has. Some variants that VIA Technologies makes have dual LAN ports; others have video outputs, CardBus, and flash slots. And while the boards have only one 33-MHz PCI slot, which limits their expandability, they include an on-board floppy controller and a dual-port IDE controller. When equipped with one or two disk drives designed for laptops and a low profile floppy, CD, and SDRAM, the resulting machine is ludicrously small: about the size of a hardcover book. And you can build a complete machine for under $500.

The Nano-ITX board uses the new Eden-N fanless processor, which runs from 533 MHz to 1 GHz. This processor is just 225 square millimeters in size (think pinky nail) and only consumes 2.5 watts running at 533 MHz. The chip is based on a clone X86 instruction set that is roughly analogous to a Pentium 4. And while there have been some issues for programs that have been compiled very tightly to Intel X86 chips for the absolutely highest performance tuning when they try to run on the C3 chips, the rumor is that VIA Technologies has worked with platform providers to fix this. (Commercial Linux distributor SuSE, for instance, did not support the C3 chips.) The Nano-ITX board's CN400 chipset supports Serial ATA, Parallel ATA, USB 2.0, and includes a RAID 0 mirroring and RAID 1 striping algorithm. The board also supports up to 8 GB of DDR400 main memory, up from the 2 GB maximum main memory of the Mini-ITX board. And because the ITX boards are aimed at the entry PC market, the CN400 chipset includes pretty decent on-board graphics controllers. The frontside bus on the Eden-N processor used in the Nano-ITX board is 50 percent faster than on the Eden processors used in the Mini-ITX boards, and the links between the I/O and processor is four times as fast. The new board also has sophisticated TV, HDTV, and audio capabilities, and the Eden-N processor has a built-in encryption engine that can crunch the AES algorithm and transmit at 12.5 gigabits per second running at 1 GHz.

VIA Technologies did not provide pricing on the Eden-N chips or the Nano-ITX system boards, but it did say that the both would be available in the second quarter, through its distribution channel. All you need to make a Mini-ITX or Nano-ITX machine is a power supply, a case, a hard drive, a CD-ROM, and a memory stick. Everything else is integrated into the system board.