Hoping to do more than survive, VIA has now introduced a motherboard which it hopes will bring a few design wins in the media server market. Named VB8002, the new Mini-ITX board aims to offer sufficient performance while maintaining power requirements low and for that it makes use of the CX700M2 chipset and a 1.6 GHz Nano processor.

"The VIA Nano processor is ideally suited to server applications that require superb performance in tandem with great power efficiency," said Daniel Wu, Vice President, VIA Embedded Platform Division, VIA Technologies, Inc. "We are convinced that the VIA VB8002 board will be applauded by system integrators as the most well balanced, feature-rich media server platform available."

The VB8002 also boasts one DDR2 memory slot with support for up to 1GB of memory (2GB would have been a lot nicer), one PCI slot, UniChrome Pro II integrated graphics which provides hardware MPEG-2/-4 and WMV9 acceleration, one UDMA and two SATA ports, Vinyl 7.1 channel HD audio, the VT1625M HDTV Encoder, and Gigabit Ethernet.