VIA has produced a reference design for a netbook-sized motherboard that can handle 1080p video playback and 8 channel audio while using a low power VIA C7-M processor. The Surfboard C855 is designed to accommodate a 1.6GHz VIA C7-M ULV CPU on an 800MHz bus. it also uses the new VX855 HD chipset.

The board offers support for 1366 x 768 pixel playback on an internal screen and 1920 x 1440 pixel playback on an external monitor. It can handle H.264, MPEG2, MPEG-4, WMV9, and VC1 decoding. Otherwise, the reference design includes support for all the hardware you’d expect to find on a mini-laptop, including hard drives, solid state disks, up to 2GB of memory, wireless, flash card readers, and so on.

You can check out a video of the reference board in action after the break.