AOpen has a pretty good idea of the direction that the PC market is moving. If the conventional PC is to conquer the consumer/digital-home/entertainment space, it needs to scale down in size considerably. And this, again, can only be achieved using low power components. The company sees system sizes with volumes of 20, 12 and 9 liters, as compared to the 60/45/30 liters for conventional big/mini/midi tower chassis. Micro towers and sleek towers could cover the area in between 13 and 5 Liters.
If you pay attention to the graphics, you will see that the scheme makes sense from a business/modularization point of view as well. The conventional PC is moving into the micro tower, sleek tower direction using BTX, while today's SFF systems, such as the AOpen XC Cube, remain on customized standards. The Mini PC, which is at the bottom of the graphics above, is something AOpen bases on the MiniITX format (using Core Duo and 945G!)
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Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.
