When we passed a road sign pointing to the Red Snail Temple (Hong Luo Si) on the road to the Great Wall at Mutianyu, I asked my guide whether it was worth stopping off there.
“It’s not famous,” she responded without a trace of enthusiasm, which only served to further stimulate my curiosity. So, much to her chagrin, I insisted that we go there and take a look.
When I first visited Tzuhu (Cihu) over twenty years ago, it was a very beautiful and solemn place befitting the “temporary resting place” of former President Chiang Kai-shek before his corpse would eventually be returned in glory to China.
Two decades later, Chiang’s coffin still lies in the same place waiting to be moved back to the mainland and the place is as beautiful as ever. But now it has a much lighter and playful air thanks to a huge exhibition of statues of the former president that have been brought in from all over the island.
Here are a couple of photos of the new VIA Vinyl Envy VT1730 USB 2.0 Audio Controller that we have announced today.
The world’s first audio controller that supports the USB 2.0 audio standard, the VIA Vinyl Envy VT1730 delivers 8-channel, 24-bit/192kHz cinema-quality audio recording and playback capabilities in high fidelity USB and MIDI system applications.
We’re pleased to announce the launch of the new VIA Labs website featuring information about the growing range of USB 3.0 chips that we announced during CES last week.
With up to ten times greater throughput than USB 2.0 solutions, USB 3.0 is attracting a huge amount of interest as manufacturers and consumers alike look for faster ways of transferring data between their various devices. It’s definitely going to be one of the key tech trends of this year.
Here’s a picture of the new VIA M’SERV S2100 that we launched earlier this week.
Powered by a 64-bit 1.3GHz+ VIA Nano processor, this is an extremely compact system that is ideal for a wide range of server applications for SOHO and SMB customers. For more information, please see the press release here.
I was so busy at Lunch@Piero’s today that I didn’t have time to shoot any photos today except for this one of the new OLPC 1.5X featuring the VIA C7 processor. I hope to have the chance to take a few more tomorrow.
The atmosphere at this year’s CES seems a lot more positive than last year with lots of hype surrounding hot new product categories such as e-readers, smartbooks, and even 3D TV. Compared to these, the humble PC seems almost staid.
Here’s the new VL700 USB 3.0 SATA controller that we announced yesterday hot on the heels of the VIA VL810 SuperSpeed Hub controller.
This is a highly-integrated single chip solution for high-performance SATA hard disk, solid state drive, and optical disk drive devices based on the new USB3.0 standard. For more information, please see the press release here.
Today we’ve announced our new VIA EPIA-P820, the first Pico-ITX mainboard to feature the VIA Nano processor. Measuring just 10cm x 7.2cm, this highly compact board couples the VIA VX855 Media System Processor with a fanless 1.2GHz VIA Nano processor – providing system developers with the highest-performance Pico-ITX platform ever.
To speed up time to market, the VIA EPIA-P820 can be easily assembled into a system using the new VIA AMOS-3001 chassis. With a certified operating temperature of -20 to 70 degrees C, vibration tolerance of up to 7Grms and a shock tolerance of up to 70G, the VIA AMOS-3001 is a highly rugged solution that can withstand even the harshest environments and with dimensions of only 15.0 cm x 4.6cm x 10.8 cm can be installed almost anywhere.
One new technology you are going to be hearing a lot about in 2010 is USB 3.0 (also known as SuperSpeed USB). This offers up to ten times the throughput available on today’s USB 2.0 products by enabling a maximum transfer rate of up to 5Gbps – making it much easier and faster to transfer monster-sized high definition video and image files between different devices.
To help drive the transition to this new standard, our subsidiary VIA Labs has been working on the development on a number of USB 3.0 chips, including the VIA VL810 SuperSpeed Hub Controller, which we have announced today. This is the world’s first USB 3.0 Hub Controller and we will be demonstrating it at Lunch@Piero’s later this week during CES.
