From mini-ITX to nano-ITX

[Glaucus]

Legacy ports are just that, legacy. If you're gonna buy a brand new computer, what the heck do you need legacy ports for? Go USB all the way!

  - Mike

[peroxidechicken]

I've always thought a cool firewire device would be a 5 1/4 inch bay mounted break-out box with USB, ethernet, legacy ports (including PS/2) and maybe even SCSI/IDE.  It'd be a good way to shrink any future motherboard.  

If all that I/O chokes the firewire port just add another independant channel.  It'd still take up less space than a single parallel port connector.  

Just my 2c worth.   :-)

[Floid]

I've always thought a cool firewire device would be a 5 1/4 inch bay mounted break-out box with USB, ethernet, legacy ports (including PS/2) and maybe even SCSI/IDE. It'd be a good way to shrink any future motherboard.

After thinking about that for a minute... You're right.  SATA and SAS end up competing with/killing Firewire for bandwidth, but you could make the same thing for SAS pretty easily anyway.  Either way, then the drive cables don't have to be millions of miles long...

Of course, a standard backplane does the same thing conceptually ('CPU' module only needs to support one connector), and is probably cheaper to manufacture, but they still haven't caught on.  Getting the cables out of the way has implications for cooling but SATA/SAS mean those are tiny wires anyway.

---

Anyhow, back on topic... Technically, they'd do better a little narrower and longer (given existing designs for removable bay sleds), but this does have some implications by making standard drive enclosures perhaps suitable for clusters of 'blades.'

Now if they fit in 3.5" sleds and could abuse SCA backplanes and power for their own inter-device communication, *that'd* be a product, and some nice recycling/lowered TCO.  Until datacenter monkeys start plugging drives into cluster cases and frying servers, anyway.

[Argo]

It's right there above the USB ports

[olegil]

Cute, but with mini-PCI it's basically a dodo as far as I'm concerned :-(

[uncharted]

Yep.. In one nice blow.. A1-lite looks old, ugly etc..

Joanna, you are one very, very sad individual.

As for these smaller motherboards, they've got me interested in hardware again, I've done the whole "Huge beast of a machine" thing already, and to be honest it's not worth it for me.  This could be the future of the general home PC market.

[N7VQM]

Poster: Glaucus Date: 2003/9/25 19:22:22

If you're gonna buy a brand new computer, what the heck do you need legacy ports for?

Because they are simple, effective and much less expensive to interface.

I won't be ready to drop so-called 'legacy' ports until USB is built onto every microcontroller just like UARTs are now.  Even then, I suspect I'll prefer RS-232/48X.

[olegil]

I agree. I have for instance a bunch of serial devices to do ISP on embedded systems. I use a LOT of serial port IO each day.

Atmel have a nice USB microcontroller, though. So I expect it won't be long until I can do ISP with USB. But even then I have embedded systems with serial IO that need interfacing.

No, I am gonna need serial ports for quite some time. Half the fun of a thing like this is to put it into an enclosure you wouldn't normally put a PC into anyway, and that means interfacing to all sorts of cool devices. Cutting down the geek factor by removing serial/parallell io AND using mini-pci (name 3 mini-pci device manufacturers quickly ;-) ) really turns it all into a dodo

[nDude]

Do a google search on "USB to serial" and you'll find an ad ontop which sells USB to serial converters for 19$.

I'm sure you can find it a lot cheaper elsewhere, so please let the rest of us get rid of the legacy stuff  :-)

BTW the A-One / Mini A-One doesn't have the 12x faster USB 2.0 that this puppy has, right ?

[JoannaK]

Uncharted: ... Sad? .. Dunno. a bit bored at time to time.

In this case. This particular (admittely trollish) comment was just
what I see of this. Via is well known on making their nice, well
intergated and balanced small systems. This new board looks like it's
ready to go on production any day now and most likely will be
(dependiong Cpu etc..) aroun 200USD: ...

Compared to that another 'lite'.. A lot of drooling and hype for
picture of pre-prototype (not even in final configuration) board
with lot's of 'cool featuers'.. While in reality final version is
months away (6?) and price likely to be comparable to their full size
models.

So.. Like I earlier commented.. 'lite' hss it chanches.. IF they find
a way to make it priced competitevely. Unfortunately for them
competition has just jumped a bit further away.

[CodeSmith]

A1-lite looks old, ugly etc..

Hey, so do you  :-P

Seriously, who buys a motherboard because it looks pretty?!?  that has to be the lamest reason to like/dislike a piece of hardware that's going to sit inside a box all of its operational life.  If you're the uber-geek who likes running hardware bare-nekkid, you're probably more worried about cache sizes and transfer rates than the shade of green they use for the circuit boards...

[Lo]

My only beef is they should not have skipped the term micro and jumped to the term nano. It's misleading

Thats for sure Red!  I still fondly remember working on the "Mini" ModComp II 64k at NASA, wonderful elegant pre-emptive multitasking machine full of spaghetti wire warp wires.  I could stick my whole upper body in that beast.  Oh, and the diablo 1.3 megaword drive would shudder all the rack mounts if it was slightly off-balance.  So whats next? tera-micro-mini-boards?? :-?

[Floid]

Do a google search on "USB to serial" and you'll find an ad ontop which sells USB to serial converters for 19$.

I'm sure you can find it a lot cheaper elsewhere, so please let the rest of us get rid of the legacy stuff

Mm, religion.  Point is that on the regular ITX board, there's still enough room, and they come along 'free,' especially if the 686B is your best option for reasons of price/availability/compatibility.  So no reason to ditch unless you can find something else to use up the space.

(Note that the current layout doesn't leave much room for the Cardbus promised, given the CPU riser; they *could* start sacrificing ports on the backplane for it, but that doesn't seem a very useful tradeoff.  Today's state of mind has me thinking they'll just offer a bridge on a PCI card/riser.)

Now, if there was something really worth cramming in instead, or you go down to an even-smaller form factor, sure, shave 'em if you have to, they won't be *too* sorely missed and the workarounds (USB->whatever bridges) are available.

Sort of like arguing column-shifters vs. floor-shifters on cars, here.  Do what fits the design.

BTW the A-One / Mini A-One doesn't have the 12x faster USB 2.0 that this puppy has, right ?

Which puppy?  It's not on earlier models, but it's been promised for the Lite.  Hard to say if it exists on the prototype, since we can't be sure we've seen every chip that lurks immediately behind the ports.

[Bobsonsirjonny]

Poster: Dietmar Date: 2003/9/25 22:25:28
> However, it lacks too many ports. Lack of a serial alone port is fatal, and parallel means I couldn't use it as a print server.

I understand it has a header for serial on-board and as to printing, USB is much better for that anyway (faster, thin cable, hot plugging).

Hmm.. Well Parallel has better error checking.. in work we use parallel on our print servers - we could use USB, but when your driving big A0 format things...

[Nightcrawler]

About the Mini-micro-nano thing:

I think Micro-ITX would be a bad choice for a name, and was probably skipped for the same reason I don't like it. There's already Micro-ATX. If you are trying to sell something 'new and revolutionary' it's usually not very clever to name it so it can be confused with something old and uninteresting.