Wednesday VIA Technologies revealed an "industry first" with the launch of its new 64-bit dual-core VIA EPIA-P900 Pico-ITX board. It features a 1 GHz VIA Eden X2 CPU along with the VIA VX900H Media System Processor, all crammed on a board measuring just 10cm x 7.2cm.
According to VIA, the new board supports up to 4 GB of DDR3 memory, HD audio, HDMI (1080p), VGA and single-channel 24-bit LVDS display connectivity. There's even a high performance hardware HD video decoder via the latest VIA ChromotionHD 2.0 video engine.
"The VIA ChromotionHD 2.0 engine provides advanced filtering and cutting edge post-processing to perform ultra smooth decoding of H.264, MPEG-2, VC-1, WMV9, and HDCP for Blu-ray content protection providing smooth playback of the most demanding multimedia titles at resolutions up to 1080p without incurring a heavy CPU load," VIA said Wednesday. "The VIA EPIA-P900 features the VIA Vinyl VT2021, a 10 channel HD audio codec, delivering outstanding sound quality and support for Blu-ray and HD DVD Audio Content Protection."
As for other features, the EPIA-P900 provides on-board pin headers that support an additional five USB 2.0 ports, an LPC connector, SMBus connector, PS/2 support, audio jacks, LVDS, 4 pairs of DIO and two UART ports. The rear I/O includes one HDMI port, one VGA port, 2 USB 2.0 ports and 1 GigaLAN port.
"The VIA Pico-ITX allows embedded system design to pack unprecedented levels of performance into even smaller form factors," said Epan Wu Head of the VIA Embedded Platform Division, VIA Technologies, Inc. "The new VIA EPIA-P900 opens up exciting new possibilities for innovation in ultra compact embedded designs."
VIA did not offer actual pricing or availability, so stay tuned.
