MSI's Bay Trail-D Mini-ITX Board Launching This Month
MSI's Mini-ITX board powered by Intel's Bay Trail-D is coming before the month is out.
CES is full of products that might never see the light of day or aren't set to launch for a very long time. This Mini-ITX board from MSI is one of the isn’t available yet, but will apparently be out by the end of the month. When it does become available, it will be priced under $60.
The J18001 boasts Intel’s 2.4 GHz dual-core Celeron J1800 (hence the name of the board), as well as support for up to 8 GB of RAM via two DDR3-1333 SO-DIMM slots, and two SATA Gbps ports, one PCIe slot, Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 channel audio, USB 3.0 (x1), D-Sub, DVI, and HDMI. If you’re not feeling the dual-core version, MSI says there will be a version with the more powerful quad-core Bay Trail-D out in January/February for only ten bucks more.
The quad-core Bay Trail-D comes with 2 MB of L3 cache as opposed to the 1 MB in the dual-core model and comes in two flavors, the Pentium J2900 and the Pentium J2850. The former packs a graphics clock rate of 896 MHz, while the latter boasts a graphics clock rate of 792 MHz. The Celeron J1800 features the same 792 MHz graphics clock rate as the Pentium J2850.
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DIY NAS, HTPC, various types of home servers and appliances... basically anything where power efficiency and small size are more important than processing power and expansion options.
Unless you plan to play more than trivial 3D games on your HTPC, then the IGP does not matter much.
I know if I personally built an HTPC, I would try to aim for fan-less and that would be far easier to achieve with a 7.5-10W Bay Trail than a 45-65W A6.
Board (< $60) + 4GB RAM (~$30) + pico & adapter (~$22 + $9) = ~$121. Relatively cheap platform for an HTPC... I will 3D print the case for the board myself. I already have the RAM, the adapter and some HDDs.
Just FYI even the Atom Z3740 can do 40+ FPS in Starcraft 2 and 20+ fps in more graphics-intensive games (like Crysis) at 720p/min.settings (and that's a 2W part).
There is a huge potential market for this. If you cannot see it, you need to learn to look further than the tip of your nose. There is over a dozen examples in this thread - just about anything that does not require tons of processing or GPU power is a potential market for things like these.
The quad-core A6-1450 *Temash's* Bay Trail, has a greater OpenGL score than Intel HD4K graphics in CineBench15, and maxes at 7w.