In March 2001, the
chipset manufacturer
VIA Technologies released a reference design for an ITX motherboard, to promote the low power
C3 processor they had bought from
Centaur Technology, in combination with their chipsets. Designed by Robert Kuo, VIA's chief R&D expert, the 215×191 mm VT6009 ITX Reference Board was demonstrated in "Information PC" and
set-top box configurations. He later designed the Mini-ITX specification. At that point, few manufacturers took up the ITX design, but Shuttle, Jetway, etc. produced many ITX based cube computers. Other manufactures instead produced smaller boards based on the very similar 229×191 mm FlexATX configuration.
In October 2001, VIA announced their decision to create a new motherboard division, to provide standardized infrastructure for lower-cost PC iterations, and focus on
embedded devices. The result was the November 2001 release of the VT6010 Mini-ITX reference design, once again touted as an "Information PC", or low cost entry level
x86 computing platform. Manufacturers were still reluctant, but customer response was much more receptive, so VIA decided to manufacture and sell the boards themselves. In April 2002 the first Mini-ITX motherboards—VIA's
EPIA 5000 (fanless 533 MHz Eden processor) and EPIA 800 (800 MHz C3)—were sold to industrial customers.
