In a press release issued today, Via announced the release of a feature-packed new motherboard, with the "Luke CoreFusionT" processor as its base". The next release in their EPIA line, it is designed to be ultra-compact, very power efficient and yet still pack a lot of features into it. Based on the Epia EK chipset, it uses even less power than previous EPIA models. With things such as dual onboard LAN, 6-channel audio, hardware mpeg-2/4 decoding, optional gigabit ethernet and up to 1GHz core speed on the CPU, the board is designed to consume only 19W of power. Epia boards are very popular among the MiniITX and mini-PC crowd, often being used in thousands of areas you'd never imagine a PC being. With the low profile and low power demands of these boards, they become very versatile despite their lack of beefy performance as compared to other systems. Straight from the horses mouth, they had this to say about the release:
"Leveraging the power efficiency and rich integration of the VIA Luke
CoreFusionT processor platform, the VIA EPIA EK offers a true low power,
feature packed Mini-ITX solution," said Daniel Wu, Head of the VIA Embedded
Platform Division, VIA Technologies, Inc. "We are seeing explosive growth in
demand for secure, bandwidth-efficient networked devices, especially in
multimedia applications that have greater computational requirements, and
our VIA EPIA range gives developers the solution they need on a single x86
platform."
If you've ever dealt with Epia before in the types of environment they have been intended for, you've likely been pleased. The availability of this board will be this month, depending on where you are located. I hope I get the chance to try one of these nifty little boards out.