Often is the time that I look down at my beast of a PC and think that it is too big. OK, I did need that big case for future expansion (or at least I thought so at the time), yes airflow is important and yes there is a lot of stuff in there. But man - it's just too big and noisy. Becoming more laptop oriented has made me look in an unfavorable way at the large and deafening machine now; I want something smaller - something more elegant, especially for a multimedia machine that might wind up in my living room. Yes, there are some nice small ATX cases on the market, but one does often wind up feeling that a rethink of the PC design is needed, now that PCs are everywhere and everyone has them.

Enter Intel with a solution. Boffins there have been working away on the problem and now the company has announced that in the first quarter of 2006 its next-generation architecture for small-profile PCs will appear, featuring similar CPUs as its next-generation notebook-use processors, the dual-core Yonah.

In line with Intel's strategy for the digital home (East Fork), the company aims to divide its desktop PC platform into six market segments (standard sized Tower, Mini Tower, All in One, Entertainment PC, Ultra Sleek and Mini PC), with the Mini PC featuring the smallest dimensions. The six models will be based on the Intel dual-core Anchor Creek and Yonah platforms.