Home | News Archive | June 2005

JBox Embedded J2SE Platform
June 24, 2005

This week, VIA announced what it describes as the world's first x86 platform for embedded J2SE development - the violently orange JBox™. It's a collaborative effort between VIA, Sun and custom solutions provider iGoLogic.

"[The JBox™] makes embedded x86 far more accessible to Java developers for the first time", said VIA's Associate Vice President of Marketing, Richard Brown.

Those present at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco next week will be able to attend the official product launch. For the benefit of the rest of us, the unit consists of what appears to be a fairly standard 1GHz EPIA M10000 board, coupled with a 40GB notebook drive and RAM options up to 1GB. Embedded Java applications are developed with a pre-installed copy of SUN's J2SE 5.0 platform, while the underlying operating system choices are Sun's Solaris 10, with either CDE or JDS3 preconfigured, or a Linux 2.6 OS customised by iGoLogic.

Prices are not yet known, but the device is expected to be available in July 2005. More info.

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EPIA N to use Luke Technology
June 09, 2005

On display at Computex this year were VIA's latest incarnations of their as yet unreleased Nano-ITX form factor boards, their EPIA N and EPIA NL. Specifications are essentially unchanged from what we already know, apart from one major difference - the inclusion of a Luke package to reduce chip density.

The Luke Corefusion platform combines VIA's Eden-N processor and CN400 Northbridge into one elongated aluminium package, as seen in the pictures above. Comparisons can be drawn with AMD's LX800 CPU, which also combines graphics functionality into one package.

VIA also had a working NL board on show, with a fairly meaty heatsink taking up most of the surface area - as shown in our main picture, courtesy of VIAArena.

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HP's Eden powered Thin Clients
June 09, 2005

VIA has announced that three new models in HP's Thin Client range will be powered by processors from their low power consumption Eden range, as seen in several EPIA boards.

The trio of models, consisting of the t5125 (400Mhz, 128MB DDR+32MB Flash, Linux kernel 2.4), the t5520 (800Mhz, 128MB DDR+64MB Flash, Windows CE 5.0) and the t5525 (800Mhz, 128MB DDR+256MB Flash, Linux kernel 2.4) will complement the existing t5xxx range, which use Transmeta's Crusoe processors.

No information on the motherboards used in these systems, so we reckon it's probably a custom HP board. The new systems should be available later this month.

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