Tuesday, June 12th 2012
VIA's $49 APC Listed for Pre-Order, Sells Out
VIA listed the US $49 Android mini-PC (APC) system board for pre-order. The product sold out in a few hours following staggering demand. VIA announced that all pre-orders will be shipped starting early-July, and the company is working hard to make the product available through local distributors around the world, to eliminate shipping costs to the end-users. Announced the APC back in May, the APC is a neo-ITX system board that can fit into most ITX and ATX chassis, and can be powered both by external 2-pin DC input, and internal 4-pin ATX input. The board seats an ARM-based SoC, which drives Google's Android 2.3 operating system, modified for conventional PC interfaces.
37 Comments on VIA's $49 APC Listed for Pre-Order, Sells Out
android can run on a crumpet.
It would be sweet if you could mount this somewhere inside your case (along with the computer that you already have)
I would like a SATA port there. ;)
ANyway, about that power plug:
a usb ethernet to receive the connection and one rj-45 to a switch would then make it a router. fun at least :)
but a custom built one will be the best bet considering you dont need anything else.
but how will this support a touchscreen?
i can imagine many people using this getup in their cars.
and 800MHz CPU?
but the touch part probably wont work :p
This way we would finally have decent multicore (the upcoming more powerful versions of quad core Krait S4 come to mind) desktop system that consumes less power than Atom/Brazos motherboard, yet delivers better performance and costs less than $100 to boot (motherboard with integrated CPU and GPU, RAM, chassis). Quiet and affordable desktop that can serve as media hub, gameplay box, server, router or office computer ...
Something along the lines of:
- APQ8064 CPU with Adreno 320 GPU running at 1.7+ GHz (with its built-in WiFi)
- 1 GB RAM + SO0-DIMM expansion slot (or two expansion slots if that is cheaper)
- SD card reader that supports all the new uber-sized card types
- SATA controller (hopefully with support for at least 2 internal connectors + 1 eSATA)
- two ethernet connectors (1 gbps support would be nice on one port at least)
- HDMI and VGA video output
- 5+1 sound
- a handful of USB ports (3.0 would be nice)
- in an ITX-sized box with a built-in PSU (given 13.5W power consumption of this board I take 50W would be more than enough yet very cheap to manufacture, due to smaller dimensions and lower specs should be cheaper to produce than cheapest ATX boxes)
If above board with PSU costs $50 and bottom of the barrel ATX case with "480W" (read: 200W) PSU and plenty of connectors costs $30 (clickety-click: LOGISYS Computer CS305BK Black Steel ATX Mid Tower... ), then $100 with above specs should definitely be doable. Such a system would undoubtedly sell much better than this toy board too and given VIA's lousy performance in x86 market this might just be the way to save the company and spearhead the non-x86 PC revolution that IT analytics predict for ~2015.
M$ will have a suitable operating system out in less than 6 months, Android should be trivial to get running plus there woudl always be the straight Linux/*BSD for ARM alternatives. The first to come up with something decent is likely to be the one to reap most benefits before otthers catch up with.
Anyway, ARM is coming.