"Believe it or not, this simple PCIe slot is that poster child of a vast area of contention between VIA's and Intel's take on the mini-ITX designs. Intel is trying desperately to control how their Atom-based platforms are produced, what features they have and what price they sell for in an attempt to control their overall product line and keep Atom from cannibalizing the Celeron parts. That means no PCIe slots, limited DIMM support and almost no retail availability for Intel's Atom.

VIA is obviously taking the other approach, opening up their mini-ITX 2.0 solutions to any and all takers as they simply wanted to see their CPU and platforms adopted by as many users and customers as possible."