Taiwan-based ECS has been selling small form-factor desktop computers for a number of years, but when WinFuture’s Roland Quandt stopped by the company’s booth at Computex last week, he spotted something a little different: a tiny single-board computer with an Intel Gemini Lake processor.
The PB02CFMB board measures just about 2.4″ x 2.4″ and supports Intel Celeron N4000 dual-core or Celeron N4100 or Pentium Silver N5000 quad-core processors. It also has built-in support for Bluetooth 4.2, but not much else.
Instead, the company designed the board to be used with a stackable add-on module that brings features like WiFi, USB, Ethernet, and HDMI ports.
ECS uses the single-board computer for its own products like the Liva Q2 mini PC, but ECS is also an ODM, so the board is also available for other system builders to buy. It doesn’t sound like ECS plans to sell single units though, so don’t expect to place an order for the PB02CFMB unless you need a few thousand units.
You can find more pictures of the little board at WinFuture.
This looks good, but there is no mention of storage capacity. Is it limited to only 32gb of storage? I don’t see any SATA or m.2 connectors on the board. Storage does not look expandable.
I guess with that chipset it’s eMMC only. As far as I know these Atom-based Celerons and Pentiums lack SATA and because of that M.2 support.
This is the mobo for the Liva Q2? I can see why they wouldn’t want to sell it without its case…
https://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Product/Product_LIVA.aspx?DetailID=1772&LanID=0#
I think these can lead to even smaller computers. I wonder how many different operating systems one could use on them?
I don’t think it’s smaller in total footprint across the two PCBs than the Intel Compute sticks of yesteryear, but damn it’s still impressive!