You know that thing about robots eventually taking over the world? Or computers? Or robots with computers in them and at first you’re like, “Hey cool, I’m friends with a robot and we play Scrabble together because he has a computer in him,” but after a while the robot gets all moody and you start to notice stuff missing from your room and all of a sudden the robot is, like, locking you out of your house and punching you in the upper arm for no reason? Maybe that robot would have one of these VIA Mobile-ITX boards in it. It’s small, is what I’m saying.
And sure enough, it seems that VIA has indeed already kowtowed to our soon-to-be robot overlords, as evidenced by this quip in the company’s press release:
“Mobile-ITX offers system designers a more compact, flexible and feature rich solution for a range of device designs and is especially suited for next-generation, ultra-compact applications in military, medical, robotics and transportation segments.”
Robotics, eh? I’m going to move in with that cave guy until this blows over. Before I leave, though, I’d be remiss if I didn’t list some of the features of the Mobile-ITX platform:
- Board size: 6cm by 6cm (2.36 inches by 2.36 inches)
- “Support for complete range of I/O standards including USB, CRT, TTL LCD, PCIe, SPI, LPC, Video capture (or COM), SDIO, IDE, PS/2, SMB, GPIO, Audio, DVI, LVDS (by Transmitter).”
- Low power consumption, 12-watt power supply, fanless design
It’d be nice to see this spill over into the consumer sector, though the importance of mere trinkets and gadgets seems greatly diminished when you’ve got robots after you.
VIA Mobile-ITX Form Factor [VIA.com.tw]