14 DAY TRIAL // Micro-Star International is a brand that most consumers know of because of its presence on the motherboard and graphics card market, but the company has other business outlets.
The outlet we are concerned with right this moment is the market segment for high-performance embedded systems.
Which is to say, the market for compact but powerful systems used in fields like public transportation, surveillance, arcade gaming, digital signage, Kiosks, etc.
Long story short, MSI has introduced the MS-9A68 embedded system for display-critical applications, like video-interactive devices and monitoring applications.
An Intel Ivy Bridge mobile central processing unit acts as the so-called heart of the small, relatively thin box-like computer.
Up to 16 GB of standard or low-voltage DDR3 SO-DIMM memory backs up whatever chip is selected (we don't have an exact list of either).
SATA 3.0 and mSATA by miniPCIe slot are supported, suggesting a broad range of storage options.
Speaking of connectors, the MSI MS-9A68 comes with four powered COM ports, six USB ports (two USB 3.0 and 4 USB 2.0) and dual Gigabit LAN (one with iAMT 8.0).
All these, along with 3D graphic performance (with multiple 1080p capability) and support for 3 independent displays (for Ivy Bridge only, via DP+DP+DVI-I) paint a promising picture.
No discrete or notebook-like AMD or NVIDIA GPU is mentioned, so we can only assume that the iGP in the Ivy Bridge CPU has to handle the video side. DirectX 11 and Shader Model 4.0 are supported.
“The design of 2 DisplayPorts and the DVI-I enables high-bandwidth transmission of videos, as well as analog or digital media to be connected,” the company wrote in its press release.
All in all, MSI's invention, as small and box-like as it is, is ready to operate in factory, transportation, utility or process automation. MSI even put effort into making it look nice, so it needn't be hidden regardless of the situation.