VIA Launches pico-ITX board with dual-core CPU

Picture: Eden X2 (on the left) in comparison with Intel Pentium B940 (on the right)

On November 9, VIA launched it's new VIA EPIA-P900 Pico-ITX board, with a dual-core processor. Pico-ITX is the industry's smallest commercially available form factor, making this the smallest ever commercially available board with multi-processing capabilities. According to Epam Wu, Head of the VIA Embedded Platform Division, "The VIA Pico-ITX allows embedded system design to pack unprecedented levels of performance into even smaller form factors."

Based on the Pico-ITX form factor, this board measures a mere 10cm x 7.2 cm, and uses a 1.0 GHz vIA Eden X2 CPU and the VIA VX900H Media System Processor (MSP). This combination gives us smooth playback of even the most demanding video formats, at resolutions as high as 1080p, and includes improved video rendering and other multimedia capabilities. It also provides an ideal platform for many other uses where size and performance are important.

The VIA VX900H MSP supports up to 4 GB DDR3 memory, HD audio, HDMI, VGA and LVDS display connectivity, and a high performance hardware HD video decoder, provided by the VIA ChromotionHD 2.0 video engine.

The VIA ChromotionHD 2.0 engine provides ultra smooth hardware decoding of H.264, MPEG-2, VC-1, WMV9, and HDCP for Blu-ray content. This provides smooth playback of the most demanding multimedia titles at resolutions up to 1080p without incurring a heavy CPU load. The VIA Vinyl VT2021 10 channel HD audio codec delivers high-quality sound, with support for Blu-ray and HD DVD Audio Content Protection.

Connectors on the board include 5 USB 2.0 ports, PS/2 support, audio jacks, LVDS, 4 pairs of DIO, 2 UART ports, and LPC and SMBus connectors. Rear I/O includes HDMI port, VGA port, 2 USB 2.0 ports and GigaLAN port.