Small is Beautiful: 10 Years of Mini-ITX Read online

Small is Beautiful

  Ten Years of Mini-ITX

  By

  VIA

  *****

  PUBLISHED BY

  *****

  Small is Beautiful

  Copyright © 2011 by VIA

  ISBN – 978-0-9872095-7-3

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author or publisher.

  Images contained in this eBook remain the copyright of the owners. Please refer to the Acknowledgements section for information about contributors to this eBook.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Recollections

  Mods to Remember

  Home PCs – with unexpected style!

  The “Coelacanth-PC”

  The “Commodore 1541 Disk Drive ITX PC”

  The “Cool Cube”

  Mega-ITX

  Project Jelly Bean

  The “Spider Case”

  The “BBC ITX B”

  Millennium Falcon PC

  Home Media Centres

  The “Accordian ITX”

  The “Encyclomedia”

  EPIA Alloy Mod

  The “GTA-PC”

  Ingraham

  Jukebox-ITX

  Mini Falcon

  Mini-Mesh Box

  The “Tortoise Beetle”

  Web/file Servers

  The “Attache Server”

  The “Deco Box”

  The “Frame”

  The “Humidor CL Server Project”

  The “Supra Server”

  Car PCs

  Ford Focus Car PC

  MP3Runner Car PC

  The Dakota Project

  The “DOS Head Unit”

  The “VESPA-PUTER”

  Mini-ITX Goes Commercial

  Domo Arigato, Mini-ITX Goes PC-Bot-O

  Mini-ITX and the Darpa Grand Challenge

  Mini-ITX and the VIA pc-1 Initiative

  Mini-ITX goes into the Desert

  The Next Ten Years

  Acknowledgements

  About VIA Technologies, Inc.

  Disclaimer

  Introduction

  I still vividly remember the excitement I felt when I saw the first prototype of the Mini-ITX just over ten years ago. It was so much smaller than any PC motherboard I’d seen before and I had this gut feeling that it would be very popular even though I didn’t have a clear idea of exactly what type of systems it would be used in.

  It took the enthusiasts who leapt on the Mini-ITX to show me and the rest of the industry its true potential with the stunning ingenuity, creativity, and sheer hard work they put into the mods they created with the platform. It was they who demonstrated that PCs no longer needed to be big, beige, and boring and could be small, stylish and silent instead.

  This book marking the tenth anniversary of the Mini-ITX is above all a celebration of the tremendous creative spirit shown by everyone who got hold of a board and built a mod or system using the platform. It also traces the continued development of the Mini-ITX over the past decade and its impact of the platform on the PC, Thin Client, and embedded markets, as well as exploring some of its potential future applications in the Mobile + Internet Cloud.

  I would like to give my sincere thanks to everyone who contributed to the book by allowing us to include pictures and descriptions of their projects in it. Unfortunately, we were only able to feature a limited number of mods in the book, and I would like to offer my apologies to those people whose projects weren’t included and thank them too for their contribution to the Mini-ITX revolution.

  Working on this book together with Tim Brown, Mike Fox, Edward Lin, and Julia Hsiao from the VIA International Marketing team was a fun and inspirational experience. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it.

  Richard Brown

  VP, International Marketing

  VIA Technologies, Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Recollections

  Genesis of the Mini-ITX

  When VIA first entered the x86 processor business in 1999 with the acquisitions of Cyrix and Centaur, our CEO Wenchi Chen had a radically different vision for the PC market than Intel and AMD.

  While these two giants were engaged in a relentless MHz (Megahertz) race, Chen strongly believed that the future of the industry lay in creating affordable low power PCs that would enable people to access the Internet as well as run a full range of standard productivity, communication, and multimedia applications. The development of such systems, Chen predicted, would not only increase computer usage in developed countries, but also expand the footprint of the PC to emerging markets such as China, India, and Latin America where hundreds of millions of people had yet to own a computer.

  Promoting such a radical new vision proved to be very challenging in an industry where at that time “innovation” was primarily driven by the need for mainstream PC OEMs and manufacturers to come out with highest performance new systems based on the latest processors from our competitors. While customers would listen politely when we evangelized the benefits of low power consumption and form factor innovation, they would invariably end the conversation by asking to see how our processor performance numbers stacked up against the competition.

  Despite this initial indifference, we continued to plug away promoting our vision of affordable low power computing to the market, while at the same time working on a number of development projects in the background to showcase its potential.

  One such project was the development of a new compact motherboard form factor called the Mini-ITX by Robert Kuo, one of our senior engineers. Measuring just 17cm x 17cm, the Mini-ITX was 50% smaller than any other standard motherboard form factor available on the market. It was also designed to consume significantly less power and came with a much more highly integrated feature set than other motherboards available at that time, including an integrated processor.

  When Robert first showed demo versions of the Mini-ITX, it aroused a lot of interest in the company. Here at last was the embodiment of the low power, low cost computing vision that VIA had been evangelizing. But we were still unsure how it would be received by the market.

  Launch of the Mini-ITX

  VIA VT6010 Mini-ITX Mainboard Reference Design

  Unlike the glitzy processor launches often conducted by our competitors, we introduced the Mini-ITX reference design in a low-key fashion with the release of a modest eleven-page white paper outlining the features, specs, and power requirements of the platform.

  The white paper also laid out some of the potential system applications that we saw the Mini-ITX being adopted for, including the “Information PC”, a low cost computer priced between $199 - $499, the “Information Station”, a multimedia box for connecting to the TV, and a variety of loosely-defined “Digital PC Appliances”.

  For very good reason none of these names ever made it into the PC industry lexicon, but thankfully our clunky marketing jargon didn’t hold back interest in the Mini-ITX either. Indeed, almost as soon we issued the white paper we were inundated with thousands of emails from people throughout the world giving us their ideas on what they would do with the Mini-ITX platform, ranging from mini-PCs, HTPCs (Home Theater PCs), fanless PCs, and media servers to more exotic applications such as robotics, Car PCs, and wireless repeater stations.

  Somewhat to our surprise, the vast majority of the ideas and enquiries we received about the Mini-ITX came from PC enthusiasts and end-users, who we had assumed were mainly interes
ted in high-performance systems for gaming and other intensive multimedia applications.

  The response from our direct industry customers such as computer makers and motherboard manufacturers was, on the other hand, much more muted. So to make sure that we leveraged the growing momentum behind the platform, we decided to bring out the first generation of Mini-ITX mainboards under our own VIA EPIA brand name with the hope that our motherboard customers would follow suit once they saw demand for the platform begin to grow.

  Taking the decision to build and sell the Mini-ITX ourselves was crucial to the subsequent success of the platform, for it allowed us to speed up its time to market and ultimately drive its industry-wide adoption. If we had taken the traditional route to market through our motherboard customers, the Mini-ITX could very well have languished as yet another interesting lab project that never quite made it to market.

  Mini-ITX Hits the Market

  In April 2002, five months after the release of the Mini-ITX white paper, we officially launched the first two Mini-ITX boards: the VIA EPIA-800 featuring the VIA C3 800MHz processor, and the VIA EPIA-5000 with a fanless VIA Eden 533MHz processor.

  Almost immediately, PC enthusiasts started translating the ideas they had sent us about how they would use the Mini-ITX into an amazing array of projects that they documented in tremendous detail on their own websites, Internet forums, or www.mini-itx.com, which soon established itself as the main portal for showcasing innovation around the form factor.

  Accordion-ITX

  As you will see in the next chapter of this book, the inventiveness and creativity shown by the enthusiasts was quite simply incredible and it was immensely exciting to see how people could transform a small, humble motherboard into virtually anything from a gas can PC or toaster PC to a beautifully carved wooden art-deco home computer or a full-blown Star Wars Millennium Falcon case mod.

  For all the industry talk at the time about moving beyond the plain old beige box PC, it was the enthusiasts beavering away at their workbenches who showed us how to think – and act – out of the box.

  Mini-ITX Goes Mainstream

  Tranquil T2.e low profile Mini-ITX PC system

  As awareness of the Mini-ITX grew, thanks in large part to all the ingenious system mods that were being created around it, the platform was gradually adopted by a number of motherboard makers and also inspired new companies such as Hush and Tranquil to enter the then nascent market for silent, fanless, small form factor PCs.

  Mini-ITX Thin Client and Embedded Systems

  With its small footprint, low power consumption, and fanless operation, the Mini-ITX was also adopted for Thin Clients and a wide variety of embedded system applications, including industrial PCs, POS (Point of Sale) systems, digital signage, fleet management systems, and even custom nail painting machines.

  Ultimately, both Intel and AMD also adopted the Mini-ITX for their processors, making it the de-facto form factor for small PCs. As a result, it has become a standard industry platform, shipping in tens of millions of units a year.

  VIA Mini-ITX Development

  As momentum grew behind the Mini-ITX platform, VIA focused on optimizing the performance of successive generations of boards while maintaining similar levels of power consumption.

  VIA Mini-ITX Mainboard Milestones

  In addition to the introduction of higher-performance yet low power VIA C7 and VIA Nano processors, key enhancements included new digital media chipsets such as the CLE266, CN400, CX900, and VX900 with advanced video decoding capabilities to meet the growing demand for improved multimedia performance. At the same time, enhanced networking and connectivity features such as Dual LAN and wireless support were added to improve the overall flexibility of the platform.

  Most recently, boards featuring dual core VIA Nano X2 and fanless VIA Eden X2 processors have also been added to the VIA Mini-ITX line-up, further increasing the levels of performance available on the platform. More multicore boards are also planned for the future.

  Beyond the Mini-ITX

  The successful introduction of the Mini-ITX sparked growing demand for even smaller computing platforms, particularly for embedded system design applications.

  In response to this, VIA defined the new Nano-ITX form factor measuring just 12cm x 12cm in March 2003, and introduced the first commercial Nano-ITX board, the VIA EPIA-N Series, in 2004.

  Three years later in April 2007, VIA launched the even smaller Pico-ITX form factor, measuring just 10cm x 7.2cm, and then in 2009 we unveiled the first commercial Mobile-ITX board measuring only 6cm x 6cm.

  Mini-ITX Goes Embedded

  As the popularity of the Mini-ITX grew in the embedded market, VIA officially established the new VIA Embedded Platform Division (VEPD) in January 2004 to focus on the specific needs of this segment and develop boards for a growing range of specialist design applications such as industrial PCs, POS, digital signage, and fleet management systems.

  VIA ARTiGO DIY PC Kit

  In addition to creating ever smaller motherboard form factors, VEPD moved into the development of complete system solutions, including the VIA ARTiGO DIY PC Kit based on the VIA Pico-ITX form factor. At the same time, VEPD also significantly expanded its software support capabilities, offering complete solutions covering everything from the driver source code to tools, Board Support Packages (BSPs), and even applications.

  Conclusions

  In the space of just ten years, the Mini-ITX had become more than just a low power, small form factor motherboard. As well as spurring the emergence of a vast global market for energy-efficient small factor PCs, it had also established itself as the heart of a rich ecosystem focused on the development of embedded devices for a rapidly expanding array of highly-sophisticated applications.

  And to think all this may never have happened if it hadn’t been for the ingenuity and pioneering spirit shown by a small group of enthusiasts who initially leapt on the platform.

  Table of Contents

  Mini-ITX: Mods to Remember

  Introduction

  The first people to see the huge potential of the Mini-ITX were members of the PC enthusiast community, who immediately grasped the possibilities that the low power, low noise, and compact size of the form factor opened up for building a myriad of innovative computing devices.

  Almost overnight websites and forums sprang up on the Internet where members of the community gathered to document their projects, share their modding experiences and expertise, find answers to problems, and of course show off their remarkable creations.

  One of the first and most popular sites was mini-itx.com created by Ewan Wilcocks and Steve Randall in the UK. When we asked them why they decided to launch mini-itx.com, here is what Ewan had to say:

  “Mini-ITX.com was originally started by myself and my colleague, Steve Randall. We were obsessed with small and quiet computers and had already experimented with Flex-ATX machines. We spotted the first Mini-ITX boards whilst following the news of CeBIT 2002 online. In fact one of the articles we read would have been this one: https://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/other/display/cebit2002.html#sect6.”

  “We both bought boards (one each of the EPIA 800 and EPIA 5000). For a brief moment, we had one of every type of Mini-ITX board ever made. The domain name was available, so we thought – why not? We started our own fan-site. Our initial goals were modest – collect all the news stories and link to articles about the motherboards we had just bought and put them on a page. Things took off from there pretty quickly. Several sites had pictures of EPIA boards inside home-built cases and within a couple of weeks we had a projects section on the website. Some of these became very popular and we had a regular readership eager for the next project. The boards were small, inexpensive and came with their own processor on board – perfect for stuffing into almost any object available. Readers would source or build increasingly elaborate cases and send us the results. The cycle continued and the interest grew. We expanded to retail a few months later. We wer
e asked to supply boards almost from day one. The Mini-ITX online store opened in September 2002 and is still going strong.”

  Another important individual to catch on to the Mini-ITX platform and take it in a commercial direction was Sascha Pallenburg, now of netbooknews.com, who back in 2002 co-founded Techcase, a company focused on developing complete hardware and software solutions exclusively for the Mini-ITX platform.

  He then went on to start Epiacenter.de and Epiacenter.com, two highly-respected German and English language community websites centered around the Mini-ITX form factor and VIA EPIA mainboards, of which he is still Editor-in-Chief. Subsequently in 2005 he started epiOS GmbH & Co. KG, a software development house providing integrated operating systems targeted at VIA EPIA-based applications.

  We had a chance to sit down with Sascha and talk to him about his thoughts on the past ten years of Mini-ITX and his involvement.

  Sascha Pallenburg

  VIA: What about the Mini-ITX revolution made you decide to start your own business based around it?

  Sascha: “I think it was back in 2002 when I unboxed my very first VIA EPIA mainboard. I remember how surprised I was because of the form factor. ‘This has to be the future of computing’ was my very first thought because at that time it seemed that computers were getting bigger, noisier and consumed more power. Mini-ITX was the complete opposite and in just 4 weeks I came up with a new business plan and we started to exclusively focus on small form factors.”

  VIA: Were you surprised by the reaction, participation and interest of the enthusiast community?

  Sascha: “Mini-ITX reanimated the hardware modding community. For the very first time it was possible to purchase a small, energy efficient x86 platform and these modding experts embraced this form factor like nothing else. No, I wasn't surprised at all but they definitely surprised me with their upcoming projects. I mean I've never seen a PC in a toaster or humidor before. Mini-ITX made this possible.”

  VIA: After all these years what's your favorite project (product or mod) that the Mini-ITX revolution has produced?