2008 brings two exciting new platforms: The Intel Atom and the VIA Nano. Both are low power and low cost CPU's, which means you can have a motherboard and CPU for less than $100,- (and lower even). The performance of these CPU's is more than good enough for educational purposes (see our hardware testing results here for more on that!) The power consumption of these boards can be below 30 Watts.

Intel has launched it's new Atom CPU only two months ago, and already many manufacturers  were showing boards designed for Atom CPU's. Intel allows Atom CPU's only to be used in small computers, laptops with screens smaller than 10" and on mini-ITX boards. Intel does not allow the Atom CPU to be mounted on other formfactors than mini-ITX. The manufacturers on theComputex were complaining that Intel did not have enough CPU's available at this moment: They will be available from September. However, Intel also has it's own Atom boards (the "Little Falls" board) which are available in the market already. It seems they give their own boards priority over others, which explains the complaints of other manufacturers. One particular interesting board that we found at Computex is a new Elite ECS board. In fact, it is so new it's not even on their website yet! The price of the board promises to be below $75,-, and best of all: It is fanless! A sample of this board is coming our way, and we are very excited to give it a test in our lab.