VIA touts "small is beautiful" with Pico-ITX boards

Taipei (Taiwan) - VIA has shrunk its motherboards again and has announced its Pico-ITX design which is barely larger than a playing card. The 10 cm by 7.2 cm board is 75% smaller than the already small Mini-ITX form factor board released a few years ago. VIA’s reference board the VT6047 runs the VIA C7 or Eden processor, and while it has most of the connectors you would expect from a full-sized board, the VT6047 can run on just 30 watts of power.

VIA says the Pico-ITX design could be used in future kiosks or embedded applications and machines could cost from $300 to $500 dollars. In addition to the low-power processors the board will have one SO-DIMM DDR2 slot that supports up to 1 GB of RAM. One SATA and one IDE connector is on the motherboard and the graphics is powered by a VIA Unichrome chip. Four USB 2.0 and 2 PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse are also on the board.

The VT6047 isn’t a slouch in multimedia capabilities either. An HD audio chip provides 7.1 sound output while an optional multi-media chip can provide TV signal output.

VIA has been a big proponent of shrinking motherboard designs and introduced its Mini-ITX form factor boards a few years ago. Those boards measured 17 cm by 17 cm and that small size was beat with VIA’s Nano-ITX boards that were a minuscule 12 cm by 12 cm.