14 DAY TRIAL // Even though Intel hasn't made its Cedar Trail processors official just yet, Asus has already showcased a mini-ITX mainboard that is built around the upcoming Atom D2700 CPU at this year's Computex 2011 fair.
The board is called the DM27NM10 IPC-I and it features an entirely passive design, which relies on a massive aluminum heatsink to cool both the NM10 chipset and the Atom D2700 processor.
This is the fastest Cedar Trail CPU to be released by Intel and it includes dual processing cores clocked at 2.13GHz, 1MB of Level 2 cache, a DDR3 integrated memory controller as well as an on-die GPU.
This is based on a PowerVR design that is fully compatible with DirectX 10.1 and that features HD decoding (MPEG2, VC1, AVC, and H.264) with Blu-Ray 2.0 support.
On Asus' board, the graphics core is connected to a DVI and to a D-Sub connector, which are placed on the rear I/O bracket.
As far as the board's expansion options are concerned, these are rather scarce as Asus has included only one PCI Express x1 slot and two SATA 3Gbps ports. An additional micro PCI-Express slot is available right next to the CPU heatsink.
The board also features two SO-DIMM DDR3 memory sockets, but Asus hasn't mentioned the maximum amount of system memory that can be installed.
Moving to the back of the DM27NM10 IPC-I, we get to see that Asus has included only a limited number of connectors, including four USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 port, dual Gigabit LAN and pair of old-fashioned COM ports.
No details regarding pricing were made public by Asus at this time. However, considering the entry-level feature set, the motherboard is expected to be one of the cheapest D2700 solutions available.
Intel's first Cedar Trail processors are expected to arrive in the forth quarter of this year, (via ComputerBase)