Taiwan"s Via Technologies Inc. will next month begin shipping a new motherboard series and chipset designed to be used in consumer electronics products. The EPIA EX series motherboard is a mini-ITX board, measuring 17 centimeters (cm) by 17 cm, the company said Thursday. The EX series board will be available in volume during January in two versions, the EX 15000G and EX 10000EG, which are designed to run with Via"s low-power 1.5GHz and 1GHz C7 processors, respectively. Pricing for the boards, which are now available in sample quantities, was not disclosed.
The boards are the first based on Via"s CX700M chipset, which includes a UniChrome II graphics core and a hardware HDTV (high-definition television) encoder, as well as the memory and peripheral interfaces used in traditional PC chipsets. Integrating all of these functions into a single chip allows computers to be smaller and consume less power. The EX motherboards and the CX700M are intended for use in small computers for consumer electronics applications, such as a digital set-top box. They will be on display at next month"s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Via said.