Google's Android OS has so far ended up in just about every device imaginable, but apparently one market has so far been ignored, the humble desktop. Taiwanese VIA Technologies spotted this omission though and has developed the APC – or Android PC – which actually is more of a motherboard than a complete solution.
The ultra compact fanless PC market has just seen the addition of a new entry from VIA sporting the company's tiny EPIA-P900 Pico-ITX board.
All the way back in May of last year, VIA announced its first quad core CPU, simply named QuadCore which was known as the L4700. Now the company has announced its first mini-ITX motherboards based on its QuadCore processor, albeit this time we’re talking about an E-series – or embedded series – processor on the new EPIA-M900 and EPIA-M910 motherboards.
VIA has teamed up with a company called Tensilica to license its Xtensa dataplane processors – or DPUs as the company calls them – to create its own SSD controller. Tensilica is a company that develops IP for customizable RISC cores – much like an FPGA in some ways – as well as a wide range of DSPs.
VIA Labs Inc., a subsidiary of VIA Technologies just announced a new way to accelerate the USB 2.0 devices using "USB2Expressway Dedicated Bandwidth Technology" feature.
VIA Technologies on Friday released the VIA VE-900 Mini-ITX, a Mini-ITX Mainboard that the company says provides an ideal platform for DIY enthusiasts keen on building their own Mini-ITX home desktop and media center PCs.
Believe us when we say that this is one of the most epic reviews we've ever put together. Not because it was the hardest roundup we've ever done, but it's by far the most time consuming one and it doesn't even have anything to do with the benchmarks we ran. We thought it'd be a good idea to do a comparative review of the various USB 3.0 host controllers out there, as by now we've finally reached a stage where there's some competition in the market with at least three major players and a couple of smaller ones. VR-Zone is also proud to have a world exclusive first review of the upcoming Renesas D720201 host controller which is launching later this year as part of this roundup.
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VLI's NAND Flash controller has been long time coming and the company has finally announced the VL751 today. It's an affordable single-chip NAND Flash controller for USB 3.0 Flash drives. Not only should it allow for more affordable USB 3.0 Flash drives, but we should also see improved performance compared to many solutions currently in the market.
Now here's an interesting turn of events, HTC has bought S3 Graphics, from VIA. This has a lot of interesting implications, least not for VIA which might be standing without a graphics partner for its future chipsets. That said, considering that HTC and VIA has common owners; this isn't a very likely outcome.
VIA Labs Inc. or VLI had a few new USB 3.0 solutions to show off as well at Computex, some rather interesting solutions and some other ones that have a lot more practical usage. VLI has as yet to pass USB-IF certification for its host controllers, but is expecting to do so later this month, which means that the first four-port USB 3.0 host controller might appear on more motherboards in the near future.
Good old VIA Technologies Inc. While most older hardware enthusiasts will probably have some memories of the company, the same usually cannot be said of the younger generation of this particular group of people, many of whom are probably not even aware of the fact that there exists a third developer of x86 chips besides the likes of Intel and AMD. And with VIA returning as a stellar exhibitor for Computex once again, we head down to its booth at the Taipei International Convention Center to see what the world's third developer of x86 chips has up its sleeves this year.
We'll take these numbers with a large helping of salt, but some VIA produced benchmark figures of its new QuadCore processor have appeared on a Japanese website. We're not sure why these numbers didn't show up until now, as we haven't seen them posted elsewhere. VIA put it's 1.2GHz+ CPU up against AMD's 1.6GHz E-350 and we'll let you guess who came out on top.
It's sometimes easy to forget that there are three x86 CPU makers, as VIA, or rather should we say Centaur has such a small share of the market that no-one really ever thinks of them these days. The company has now announced a new model simply named the VIA QuadCore and as of right now it's only available in a single model. The good news, at least for VIA's partners, is that the new CPU is pin-to-pin compatible with VIA's other CPUs which makes it easy for them to migrate their products across to the QuadCore.
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