At its IDF conference this year the silicon giant showed off two new platforms for the Home Server environment that utilise the much anticipated 'Pine view' Atom processor.

Sizing up at a timid 5x8", the Little Brutte" series follows the 3.5" form factor as many have requested... and it utilises the same Atom processor as it's bigger brother, the Brandon platform.

The Little Butte offers a single DDR2 (667/800 MHz) memory slot, 4 x internal SATA ports for hard drives, 2 x eSATA external ports, 4 x USB ports and Gigabit Ethernet – everything you need for a great home server with low power and huge expansion opportunities. This is a great step up from the LittleFalls boards that nearly all users had to pick up a PCI SATA controller for. Not only that, Little Brutte features a nice little WHS Recovery switch on board which places the home server into a WinPE environment to recover the server.



Whether the two platform reference design will catch on, who knows, but they certainly take home server hardware design forward in a way which means that next year's WHS solutions could be smaller, cheaper, use less power and greater expansion opportunities.