[HH] VIA VAB-600 Pico-ITX and VE-900 mini-ITX boards

[Tom Metro]

About a year ago VIA announced their "APC 8750, A $50 Android PC":
http://www.mail-archive.com/hardwarehacking@blu.org/msg00336.html

Just recently they announced the "VAB-600 Pico-ITX" board:

http://liliputing.com/2013/05/via-launches-vab-600-pico-itx-board-with-a-wm8950-cpu.html

  VIA has introduced a new board which you can use to build a low-power,
  small form-factor PC or embedded device. The VAB-600 is a Pico-ITX
  board which measures just 3.9´´ x 2.8´´ and which features an 800 MHz
  VIA Wondermedia WM8950 ARM Cortex-A9 processor with Mali-400 graphics.

  ...the board includes 1GB of built-in RAM and 4GB of storage, and
  should be able to handle Google Android or basic Linux applications.

  The board features a USB 2.0 port, two mini USB ports, GPIO pins, a
  mini PCIe slot, an Ethernet jack, and optional support for a
  touchscreen, SIM card, 3G, or WiFi.


Is this VIA's first foray into ARM CPUs? It was never clear to me
whether last year's APC 8750 used an ARM CPU or one of VIA's older x86
designs. (That it came with Android leans in the ARM direction, but
there are x86 versions of Android.)

That CPU seems to be slow by todays standards, given you can get $40
sticks with higher clock rates, if not multiple cores.

No pricing info. The author notes it hasn't shown up in VIA's online
store yet. Out of curiosity I followed the link anyway, and ran across
the VE-900 mini-ITX board for $90:
http://store.viatech.com/protected/product/frontProductDetail.action?id=9420

which hey label as "NEW!" but link to this review from December 2011:

http://www.bioslevel.com/v/review/VIA_VE900_MiniITX_Mainboard/1

Is their store that stale?

The review says:

  Powering the VE-900 is Via's own dual-core Nano X2 processor clocked
  in 1.4GHz.  The Nano X2 is Via's first 64-bit dual-core processor, and
  it is meant to compete against Intel's Atom CPUs in both performance
  and power consumption.
  ...
  The VE-900 also houses Via's latest VX900 chipset, allowing this board
  to support up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and provide excellent hardware
  acceleration for the latest video formats in resolutions up to 1080p.
  ...
  Via has been very friendly with the Linux community in the past, and
  most of their products tend to work in Linux out-of-the-box.
  ...
  The VE-900 held its own ground in our SuperPi testing, beating a
  desktop-class 64-bit single-core CPU with a higher clock frequency.
  ... Again, the VE-900's Nano X2 holds up against the Atom. The
  question no one thinks about when it comes to computing power deals
  with who's going to pay the electricity bill.  Unless you're playing
  the latest 3D games on your HDTV, there's little need to purchase
  multi-core CPUs and dual-bay videocards. I was impressed while
  monitoring the VE-900's power consumption through these tests.

  Via manages to pull ahead of Intel again.  While idle, the VE-900 uses
  nearly 50% less power than the Atom-based system. Considering the
  Netbook and Desktop-class Atoms can sometimes use as much power as
  early dual-core processors, the VE-900's power consumption is even
  more impressive.


It never says explicitly here, but I can assume from the Atom
comparisons that this is indeed an x86 CPU.

Notably the board has two SATA ports on it. No mention of the chipset
used, but if this thing is really over a year old, no doubt some Linux
user has posted the results of lspci.

I could see this appealing to both the D-I-Y NAS market as well as
set-top-box media player market. So why haven't we heard more about this
board? Is the performance not as good as this review's benchmarks would
suggest?

I did a search at Amazon and NewEgg to see what end-user reviews said.
Found it   at Amazon, but no reviews. Not found at NewEgg.

 -Tom