Gigabyte releases Pico-ITX Apollo Lake mini PC motherboard smaller than an iPhone

Small form-factor PCs are gaining quite a bit of traction these days, as motherboard OEMs are including more and more mini-ITX models in their offers. However, mini-ITX is not the smallest form-factor out there. We have seen functional PCs as small as a palm-sized cube, but the performance is quite limited in those cases. Ideally, one would like to strike a balance between size and performance, and that is where the pico-ITX format comes in. Not many such models exist on the market, with Gigabyte being among the few motherboard OEMs currently offering this size.
 
Gigabyte’s GA-PICO3350 model measures only 100 x 72 mm, making it smaller than a high-end smartphone and just a tad larger than a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ board. As far as performance goes, the pico-ITX board offers enough power for video decoding as it supports a 6 W embedded Apollo Lake Celeron N3350 with two cores clocked at 1.1 GHz (2.4 GHz boost), which can be coupled with up to 8 GB of LPDDR3-1866. Users can only add a SATA HDD and a SATA SSD through the SATA and mSATA PCIe connectors. Audio is handled through the dedicated Realtek ALC887 HD codec that supports 2-channel outputs.
 
The connector selection includes a serial port header, an LCDVVC/MON, an LVDS, GPIO, SMBus, and battery cable header, while the rear panel includes a DC power input, and HDMI out, 2x USB-A 3.0 ports and one GbE jack. There is also support for a wireless interface that can be connected through the M.2 slot that shares the bandwidth with the MSATA PCIe connector.
 
No info on pricing and availability, but it looks like some European retailers are expecting the board to be in stocks soon.