VIA ARTiGO A2000 dubbed an excellent solution for budget home storage

The VIA ARTiGO A2000 barebone system is designed for a quick and easy solution to storage that is affordable, silent and small enough that your home or office doesn't need to be re-arranged. It features a VIA Nano-ITX board that has a VIA C7-D processor on it. LegitReviews ran it through a whole bunch of tests and decided that it fulfilled its design intentions admirably.

"After reviewing all of the benchmarks and taking into consideration the purpose of the ARTiGO A2000, I can say that it has shown itself very well in managing and serving data despite its apparent inadequacies in actually performing CPU or graphics intensive tasks. At $239, this low-power network server seems to run cool, quiet, and stable, while still performing well in a battery of tests that put the strain on its Nano-ITX motherboard and VIA C7-D 1.5 GHz processor. When all was said and done, the ARTiGO A2000 did what it was made for: it provided an excellent solution to network storage."

It's a long review, with lots of benchmarks. Check it out here.

VIA Eden and C7 chosen for military apps

This article on COTS Journal highlights the growing use of rugged embedded computers by the military.

"The list of military programs using PC/104 in the airborne, marine, handheld and vehicular arenas continues to lengthen. Military system developers select PC/104—and its wider community of form-factors including PC/104-Plus, PCI-104 and EPIC—because of its compact size as well as the ruggedness inherent in its stacking architecture."

One example given is that of the Poseidon EPIC form-factor which uses either a VIA Eden ULV or VIA C7 processor, obviously chosen for their reliability and dpendability in tough conditions.

"For military applications that depend on remote terminals, protocol conversion or data logging in power-shy environments, the ideal SBC would combine a low-power CPU with lots of onboard communications formats."

Strong as a pitch fork

A trident is a long three pronged weapon. The word puts an image in my head of a determined looking old man, impossibly muscly for his advanced years, lunging out of the water, with not a salad fork, but a trident held valiantly above his head. Trident, a UK company that's an off-shoot of the multi-national distributor, Avnet, chose the word well in naming the company, which specialises in embedded hardware and devices. Embedded often means - stick me somewhere dirty, hot and out of sight. Like the new AMOS-3000.

"It is constructed in five pieces: the top cover, bottom plate, front and rear I/O panels and the DOM module, and is offered with desk, wall and VESA mounting options."

Versatile and built with solid materials worthy of the Trident name.

"The VIA AMOS-3000 is a based on the EPIA P700 Pico-ITX form factor board powered by either a 1GHz VIA C7 processor or an Ultra Low Voltage 500MHz VIA Eden processor."

So, solid, but also cool running and with no moving parts. More at TMCnet.com.