x86 PC Smaller than an iPhone: GIGABYTE's GA-PICO3350 with an Apollo Lake CPU
by Gavin Bonshor on October 24, 2019 2:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- Gigabyte
- Celeron
- SoCs
- Apollo Lake
- GA-PICO3350
- Pico-ITX
- N3350
Hidden underneath the mass of news is a new small Pico-ITX based SoC motherboard from GIGABYTE, the GA-PICO3350. Smaller than the latest iPhone 11 smartphone, the GIGABYTE GA-PICO3350 is 100 x 72 mm and includes an Intel Celeron N3350 Apollo Lake SoC processor, with a single SO-DIMM DDR3L slot, and a Realtek ALC887 HD audio codec.
Slightly larger than a Raspberry Pi 3 B+, the new Pico-ITX sized GIGABYTE GA-PICO3350 is based on Intel's Apollo Lake SoC with an Intel Celeron N3350 dual-core processor which has a base core frequency of 1.1 GHz, with a burst frequency of 2.4 GHz with a TDP of just 6 W. Users can install up to 8 GB of DDR3L-1866 memory into the single SO-DIMM slot, with a single SATA port and single MSATA PCIe connector. The Realtek ALC887 HD audio codec offers two-channels over the front panel header. It also includes plenty of other connectors including a serial port header, an LCDVVC/MON, an LVDS, GPIO, SMBus, and battery cable header.
On the rear panel are a single DC power input, an HDMI port, two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, and a single Ethernet port powered by an unknown Realtek Gigabit Ethernet controller. The GIGABYTE GA-PICO3350 does include a single M.2 slot on the PCB for users wishing to install a wireless interface which does share bandwidth with the MSATA PCIe connector.
Currently, there is no pricing and availability information available for GIGABYTE's GA-PICO3350, but we did locate it for sale without a price on German etailer Rosch Computer's website.
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Source: GIGABYTE/FanlessTech
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29a - Thursday, October 24, 2019 - link
What's the market for this? I've owned two Atom powered devices and neither had sufficient power to decode video.DanNeely - Thursday, October 24, 2019 - link
Industrial/embedded. All the extra non-standard IO (SMBus and GPIO on top of serial) is the give-away. LVDS is a data connection for a laptop style LCD, and I think LCDVCC/MON is a power connection for the panel.solidsnake1298 - Thursday, October 24, 2019 - link
I don't know which generation of Atom processors you've used, but I have an Apollo Lake in my HTPC and it decodes video fine. A Pentium J4205, to be exact. The iGPU in Apollo Lake is based on Skylake, which was a huge step up from past iGPU generations. The iGPU in my J4205 is easily capable of hardware decoding 1080p H264 and H265 smoothly via MPC-BE. 1080p VP8 videos on Youtube decode via iGPU as well. I have not tried 4k videos in either H264 or H265, but it is supposedly able to decode both in the iGPU.Samus - Thursday, October 24, 2019 - link
Prior to Cederview, Atom was complete shit, and it wasn't viable for any sort of video decoding until Airmont\Silvermont. I still don't think it's worth dealing with the painfully slow performance of any Atom microarchitecture-based CPU...even if it can decode video, odds are you have it in a media center if using it for that purpose, in which case you will inevitably be decompressing RAR's or managing large files.29a - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
I have a netbook with one and a QNAP NAS with a J1900 that was advertised as a multimedia box. Neither decode video very well.29a - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
The newest one I have is a J1900.PeachNCream - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
Running a Celeron N2840 which is a Bay Trail Atom from 2013 with 8GB RAM and a 1TB 2.5" SSD in an Acer Aspire ES1-111M-C7DE laptop on Windows 8.1 as my only WIndows PC. It handles gaming and light housework that I can't or choose not to bother doing under Linux. Video decode is okay up to 720p (not 720p60) on YouTube in fullscreen without problems. As it's running an Ivy Bridge derived GPU with only 4 execution units, it's quite a dog in the graphics department and passively cooled in a cramped 11.6 inch laptop chassis as well. The Celeron N3350 on this board runs 12EUs in its GPU and has more memory bandwidth available. It should be sufficient at 1080p, 4k .. not so sure about that, but I don't think that would be the intent for this platform..DanNeely - Thursday, October 24, 2019 - link
I've got to wonder how long that this had its development delayed that it's launching with msata/mpcie instead of m.2 for storage.I'm also wondering about what appears to be a second card connector on the right side of the board. it looks like about the right size for an m.2 2230 device. IF so, wifi would be my first guess about what it's for; but it seems odd to not mention it in that case.
timecop1818 - Thursday, October 24, 2019 - link
Of course the article mentions it:> The GIGABYTE GA-PICO3350 does include a single M.2 slot on the PCB for users wishing to install a wireless interface which does share bandwidth with the MSATA PCIe connector.
Yes, it's M.2 for wifi module.
fazalmajid - Friday, October 25, 2019 - link
But not NVMe.