Multiprocessing Keeps Compact Motherboard Cool

May 26, 2005

There are many ways to keep a system cool. Adding a water-cooled refrigeration unit is one way. Another method is to reduce the amount of heat, but this can be difficult without sacrificing performance. Via Technologies attacks the latter proble

William G. Wong

Via Technologies attacks the latter problem with a pair of 1-GHz Eden-N NanaBGA processors. The company figures that dual processors provide almost the same performance as one processor running at twice the speed but consuming more than twice the power, hence generating much more heat.

The Via EPIA DP-310 Mini-ITX motherboard employs passive cooling for its pair of processors. The VIA CN400 North Bridge supports the dual configuration. It also provides graphic support with the UniChrome Pro IGP, which integrates MPEG-2 decoding and MPEG-4 acceleration. Two dual-inline memory-module sockets handle up to 2 Gbytes of DR266/333/400 SDRAM.

The motherboard houses a single ATA-133 controller and adds two Serial ATA interfaces. It also includes a pair of USB ports, AC'97 audio support, one PCI slot, and one Mini-PCI Type IIIA connector found on the bottom of the board. It forgoes the PS/2 legacy port. Network interfaces include two Fast Ethernet ports and a single 1-Gigabit Ethernet port. As a result, the board can be used as a sophisticated gateway.

The DP-310 goes for $350.

See associated figure

Via Technologieswww.via.com.tw

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.