[geeks] VIA $49 "Neo-ITX"

[Mark Benson]

On 26 May 2012, at 23:38, Lionel Peterson wrote:

> The form factor is odd (half ITX?) requiring either a custom chassis or a
> mostly-empty ITX/uATX chassis.

Like I said, I think they are taking a shot at existing MiniITX embedded or
hobbyist markets where the user needs an easy swap out. One of the biggest
bugbears with all the hobbyist boards (RasPi, Beagle, Panda, et al) I've come
across is they don't fit a normal form factor cases so cases are either
bespoke or non existent. The Neo-ITX form factor means you can fit it to a
Mini-ITX chassis and put something else in the hole, like a USB hard drive/SSD
or similar. I have a very compact MiniITX chassis with an Atom D410 board in
that would take one of those VIA boards really nicely.

Here's my biggest gripe with ARM boards though, because they are all based off
phone/tablet SoC chip[sets they rarely have any decent storage controllers.
pretty-much everything is hardwired or plumbed in using USB 2.0 on current
models and down the line presumably USB 3.0. While great for external devices,
USB is BS if you want to use an internal storage, there are very few
'internal' fitment USB devices so we are stuck using SDHC or MicroSD cards
which are damned slow for the most part.

I think it's a temporary state of affairs, thankfully, hopefully boards will
start cropping up based off the beefier Tablet systems with a decent sized
block (16GB or 32GB) of SSD storage on-board. Seeing as the price of SSD just
took a huge drop recently it ought not to push up the price too much either.

For what I plan to use RasPis for (micro solid state VAX and PDP-11
simulators) it doesn't matter, the I/O on most old DEC systems was somewhat
slower than modern USB 2.0 or SD card anyway, but if things get a little more
ambitious people might start straining at the leash a bit!

--

Mark Benson

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