SMP mini-ITX board...

[Tom Huppi]

...and some general Via hardware questions.

I'm in the planning stage of an upgrade to my aging hardware,
and have some general technical questions that I hope someone
may be able to theorize about to help me determine if it might
be 'worth the wait'.

The mini-ITX form factor appeals to me as an always-up
workstation.  In looking around, I spot a dual-processor board
from Via (epia-dp) which, I suspect, will be vaporware for at
least another couple of quarters but I have hope that it would
materialize eventually.  If not, the epia-sp model is already
on the market, and the cn400<->vt8237 chipset looks on paper
to be relatively impressive compared Via's earlier offerings.
I've recently taken up a hobby that requires actual crunching
ability so it may make more sense to invest in a separate
'mainstream' system to attack the heavyweight problems on an
as-needed basis.

Firstly, I've not found a whole lot of info about the hardware
but there are some general peeks at prototype boards, and some
general info about the chipset.

 http://www.epiacenter.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=405

 http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/chipsets/c-series/cn400/

Here are my questions:

- Nehemiah CPU/{Via northbridge} MP vs. FreeBSD SMP impl.
Can anyone enlighten or theorize about if it may 'work' or not,
and how well compared to 'reference' SMP hardware.

- vt8237 USB2:
I have (will have) a device which squirts data over the USB as
fast as possible.  I understand that some motherboards have
inferior USB2 controllers.  For the life of me, I cannot find
many actual benchmark tests of this.  Anyone know off hand
whether Via's vt8237 USB is any good (+ as supported under
FreeBSD.)

- vt8237 GigE:
Via makes noise about their 1Ghz northbridge<->southbridge
interconnect (cn400/vt8237), but doesn't say much about their
vt8237<->'Via connectivity' interface shown on the above
diagram.  It appears that their GigE implementation, pci(-x?),
and a lot of other things (although *not* SATA happily),
are driven through this interface.  GigE support seems to
requires an extra chip ('VIA Velocity').  Any thoughts on the
architecture and/or experience with FreeBSD driver support
here?

Thanks for any thoughts on any of these subjects,

 - Tom