VIA Preps EPIA-P820 Pico-ITX for CES

Building upon its experience in development of power-efficient x86 processor platforms, VIA Technologies has finished putting together its first Pico-ITX form-factor motherboard capable of hardware acceleration for the latest HD video codecs and that can even support the high-performance, 64-bit VIA Nano processor.

The board measures 10cm x 7.2cm and its built-in hardware acceleration includes support for H.264, WMV, VC1 and MPEG 2/4 video codecs. Furthermore, the actual acceleration for these codecs is done at high bit rates and at display resolutions of up to 1080p.

While this feat is impressive in itself for a Pico-ITX, the EPIA-P820 performs it even while keeping CPU utilization at low levels. The motherboard is also equipped with the VIA Chrome9 HCM 3D integrated graphics core, which has full support for DirectX 9.0 and a 128-bit, 2D engine capable of hardware rotation.

The motherboard is natively equipped with an HDMI connector, a VGA port, a Gigabit LAN port and two USB 2.0 ports. Still, besides this functionality, the product uses a specifically designed I/O add-in board. Storage capabilities are provided by an onboard 44-pin IDE connector and an SATA port, with other pin connectors available for four extra USB ports, an LPC connector, PS/2, audio jacks, LVDS, an SMBus connector, two UART ports and four pairs of DIO.

"Never before have developers had the opportunity to harness full 64-bit, superscalar processing in spaces as small as the palm of your hand," Daniel Wu, vice president, VIA Embedded Platform Division, VIA Technologies, said. "The VIA EPIA-P820 combines with the VIA AMOS-3001 to create a complete embedded system that takes the latest features and digital media standards to the very smallest of places."

The VIA AMOS-3001 is the special chassis that VIA will be showcasing at CES along with the motherboard itself. Both are currently being sampled to project developers and photos may be seen on VIA's flickr photo stream.