Chipzilla, HP target Apple's Cube

Hewlett-Packard and Intel are taking Apple's Power Mac G4 Cube head on with their own highly compact PC design, codenamed Deep Forest.

Well, sort of. Deep Forest turns out to be part of Chipzilla's Concept PC... er.. concept. In other words, it's a 'this is what we could do... if we wanted to... but we don't' model.

The prototype design isn't quite as cubic as the Cube - it measures 10in x 13in x 4in, "about the size of a lunch box", says the developer duo. Crammed inside are a Pentium 4 CPU, 10/100 Ethernet, seven USB ports and a slimline AGP 4x graphics card. We assume - though neither company said so - there's a hard drive and some memory in there too, and presumably a DVD drive.

The casing is sealed, so don't expect to upgrade your Deep Forest, were you ever to be able to get your hands on one. We're not sure whether it too suffers from Cube Cracks™ - or mould lines, or whatever Apple is calling them these days - but its front-to-back airflow cooling system seems to mirror the Cube's bottom-to-top airflow cooling system.

"Deep Forest is a collaborative effort to address a new category of desktop computing that is powerful, easy, small, legacy-reduced, and network-optimised," says Pat 'Kicking' Gelsinger, VP and CTO of Intel's Architecture Group. Again, that sounds like the USB and FireWire enable, floppy disk-less Cube.

As we say, HP and Intel stress that Deep Forest is "a technology demonstration and not a product for sale". And why not? Presumably because, like Apple's own advanced PC design, which is on sale, no one's going to buy it. Ahem. ®

Register Factoid Chipzilla and HP's new machine is named in tribute to Star Treki
's very own 'Bones' McCoy, Deep Forest Kelley. Apparently.