As is my daily habit, I was looking through my inbox this morning in the ever-elusive pursuit of storage news when I happened upon a link to VIA’s announcement of the Pico-ITX platform.  Since the press release was from April, 2007, I decided to troll about and see if any benchmarking, testing, critiquing had been done on the platform.  So, without hesitation, I loaded up one of my favorite sites for ITX-related goodness, Mini-itx.com, and saw the following: Pico-ITX review.

Now, given that I work in the storage industry, have put together more visualization workstations than I care to count and generally feel on top of my PC game, I'm not easily impressed by anything, let alone "miniaturized PCs."  Let’s be honest,historically the basic FP/ALU performance of these devices is terrible compared to AMD Semprons and Intel Celerons, much less the Athlon64 and Core 2 Duo lines.

That automatically makes most people look away, especially in the industries I cover. The AES integrated engine (VIA Padlock) is impressive, but unless you’re running it as a cryptographic specific device, it’s a negligible value add.   The real beauty of the ITX platform lies in the potential applications of its technology.  For example, Car PCs typically don't need much in the way of video performance but they have space/power requirements. Integrating a Pico-ITX (or its “bigger” brother Mini-ITX) would be ideal. 

Using a ruggedized 2.5” SATA drive, you could feasibly create an impressive integrated Car PC with a robust feature set. Even better, add a 64GB SSD and you’ve got a skip-free solution with impressive performance.  Another potential application would be low-power encryption or render clusters.  Ainkaboot, for example, has an impressive set of solutions targeted at different verticals (Grid computing, rendering, compute clusters, etc) based on Mini-ITX solutions (both VIA and Intel).  You could feasibly integrate these Pico-ITX solutions into a cryptographic solution that would provide significant performance per watt in a 2U/3U rack.  Solutions are only limited by your imagination.

Looking at the platform from a different angle, there are a few obvious deficits -- no mini-PCI/Express slots (limiting I/O expansion), hardwired VGA (though DVI is provided via an onboard header), terrible video scaling and playback, and the aforementioned poor ALU/FP performance. 

To offset these deficiencies, however, you have incredible platform flexibility (size and power), an impressive cryptographic engine (application specific, of course), and the ability to integrate almost anywhere. With the current focus on green computing and efficiency, the Pico-ITX looks to be a significant advancement for ultra mobile computing in a power conscious world. I, for one, will be looking forward to its ongoing development.