Intel Atom headed for miniature motherboards: perfect for homebrew gaming consoles?
Wonder: tiny motherboards from Via Technologies which fit inside anything from bottles of whisky to hollowed-out books. Dismay: They're not very powerful and tend to be sold to the people who make cash registers. Refresher: Intel's Atom and Via's Isaiah high-performance, low-power chips to be added to Mini-ITX 'boards.
"With Intel restricting its Atom processor to only be used with mini-ITX-based motherboards, mini-ITX chassis are expected to see a surge in demand in June, according to sources in the channel. ... In order to make a clear separation between nettop products and traditional entry-level PCs, Intel only allows Atom processors to be used with mini-ITX motherboards, limiting the platform with a lack of PCI Express and only a single DIMM slot for up to 2GB DDR2 memory."
It's not really clear to me if the "limitation" here is really a specified restriction from Intel or merely inherent to the small motherboards' lack of features. A company called Arbor, for example, makes a Mini-ITX motherboard with a PCI-Express x16 slot--let's see if it's got plans for an upgrade.
Intel Atom to boost mini-ITX chassis [DigiTimes]
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Well, lets hope the anti-trust guys in the US read this as well. But I'm quite confident that Intel shelled out enough money to bribe them into looking the other way for the next few years, while they use their market power to prevent prices of overpowered CPUs from falling down to where they should be, as consumers become aware that you don't actually need a 40 ton truck to do your grocery shopping. But since Intel gets a lot more profit from the latter, they just cripple the more reasonable Atom to the (periphery-wise) least flexible mainboards around.
Gotta love 'em.
the atom is due to be used on the new verion of the eeepc which ies pci-e for it's flash memory
andasfar as i know it isn't mini-ixt based so i don't think the limitation is a legal one
Give me one with 3 nics on it and i will have a new router
another with support for dual monitors and a new desktop it shall be