14 DAY TRIAL // Via technologies announced today two new motherboards that deliver an excellent human-to-machine interaction and make use of the latest HD codecs and media-streaming technologies to deliver a great multimedia experience when paired with the VIA Nano 64-bit, high-performance processor. The actual products are the VIA EPIA-M800 Mini-ITX and VIA EPIA-N800 Nano-ITX boards and are meant for Windows 7 and next-generation embedded systems.
"By selecting the VIA Nano processor for the VIA EPIA-M800 and VIA EPIA-N800, we've managed to build on a successful product line and address the needs of the market as we move in to 2010," Daniel Wu, vice president, VIA Embedded Platform Division, VIA Technologies, Inc., said. "These new board designs will help facilitate the gradual transition toward technologies that are creating a new breed of graphically sophisticated and digitally vibrant devices."
The EPIA-M800 Mini-ITX motherboard is built with an IDE controller, two SATA II ports, up to six USB 2.0 connectors and a shared Compact Flash port for storage capabilities. The board is meant for mission critical applications and heavy workloads. Video output is allowed by a DVI port on the front panel and, by using a daughterboard, an extra DVI or HDMI port. The EPIA-M800 Mini-ITX also has dual Gigabit LAN ports (on the PCI Express bus) for connectivity and supports an 18-bit TTL signal output, an S/PDIF connector and CCIR–656/601/ transport stream video. The board comes with either a 1.6GHz chip or a fanless 1.2GHz VIA Nano processor.
The VIA EPIA-N800 Nano-ITX board is specifically aimed at compact digital display and signage applications. It has a DRAM slot on the bottom side and is capable of offering display connections to embedded panels through the VGA and the 24-bit, multi-configuration, dual channel LVDS transmitter. Still, even though it measures a mere 12cm x 12cm, the motherboard still has expansion possibilities through the Mini-PCI slot, two onboard SATA connectors and pin headers for COM, PS2 and USB ports.
What gives the two boards their multimedia capabilities is the VIA VX800 unified chipset. This chip integrates both the VIA Chrome9 IGP for DirectX 9.0 3D graphics and the VIA Chromotion video engine, along with up to six channels of VIA Vinyl HD Audio. Together, these features enable an advanced hardware acceleration for media using the MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV9 and VC-1 video formats. Furthermore, the VX800 also boasts an HD video processor capable of VMR.
Both motherboards are already available as samples and come with a product manufacturing support of at least three years.