Via bends genders with dual CPU fenders

VIA CAME OUT WITH a gender bending product today, a low power dual CPU mini-ITX server motherboard called the DP-310. It is powered by a pair of Eden-N chips running at 1GHz. A few weeks ago, they showed me a prototype, and it looked like the picture below.

Today Via officially introduced it at CeBIT.

It is meant for a small, low power server environment where moving parts and or noise is a bad thing. You can put one in a closet and forget about it, or put it in a rack with a density of 168 CPUs per rack using around 2.5kW. Something like this is ideal small business server, it has enough power, a second CPU to keep single rogue process from causing problems, and can be put in a closet without ventilation.

The final part probably differs from the picture above, I was told to expect a second DIMM slot on the release version, and other changes will inevitably accompany that. Either way, if you get the board, a small form factor case, a DIMM and a HD, you have a very inexpensive server. It would surprise me if such a server cost more than $500, add a second HD, a GB of RAM and a DVD-R and you and most likely get away with a $700 box.

I think this is a potential winner for VIA. It may not have the horsepower of a quad Opteron monster, but with hardware encryption and hardware MPEG-2/4, it takes two of the most CPU intensive tasks off the table. The DP-310 should be more than fast enough for most file serving and light duty server tasks, and come at a nice price.

The full spec sheet also adds a Gig-E port and two 10/100 ports, 4 USB 2.0, 2 SATA and a PATA port. 6 channel sound is also thrown in there, but for a server, I can't figure out why. I currently have this machine's predecessor as my home media center/file server, and with a single CPU and no MPEG acceleration, it does a great job of playing music, videos, and sharing files to the home network. The DP-310 only adds more goodies to the mix, I can't wait to play with it. µ