AnandTech got some more hands-on time with the Sonoma Media Center XPC from Shuttle, a box that we mentioned briefly yesterday, but I’m starting to suspect we’ll hear a lot more about. While it’s not the first Media Center PC to take the set-top form factor, Shuttle has a special gift for cramming lots of power into a small space (so gifted, in fact, that they are dropping out of the motherboard market to focus on XPCs), and the Sonoma is no exception.
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/laptops-pcs/media-centers/index.php#shuttle-xpc-media-center-intel-joins-media-center-race-029312
The PC side of things is more than fine, with a Pentium M and a PCI Express slot (and another 16x one in future revisions for SLI action), but it’s the television side of things that is perhaps even more interesting. Anand points out not only CableCard support, but hints that future versions of Media Center (2006?) will support “content protected HDTV content over digital cable services.” Ignoring that “content protected content” sounds like a blank screen, that means one of the final hurdles of Media Center—HDTV—is about to be jumped.
Sonoma Media Center XPC from Shuttle [AnandTech via DigitalMediaThoughts]
