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There's a well-known saying involving woods, trees and the inability of anyone surrounded by the latter being able to see the former. It was difficult not to bring this terrible cliché to mind when sitting in a conference room watching my seventh PowerPoint presentation of the day, as an Intel engineer - someone who had been directly involved in the design of the new Intel Core chip that we present in such glory on the cover - described the Core as a minor evolution from the previous Intel mobile chip of choice, the Pentium M.

In a sense, he's right. From an Intel engineer's point of view, 'all' Intel has done is squeeze two enhanced Pentium M cores onto a single chip, change the architecture so they can share 2MB of Level 2 cache, and at the same time lower the power demands of the CPU so that it can run at an average of 1W. A fine technical achievement, but all in a day's work for someone whose IQ probably approaches 200.

Those of us blessed with IQs closer to double figures may not be able to complete Sudoku puzzles so quickly, but we're fortunate enough to see the lush woods rather than the dry individual trees.

In my case, this takes the form of simply using the new chip and gasping in wonder as it powers a notebook through CorelDRAW, Office 2003 and even Photoshop faster than Intel's top-end desktop processor. And if you tried to put that into a notebook, it would burn the Intel Inside logo into the palm

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of your hands within five minutes.

The Core is an astonishing chip, and for the first time it will cross the divide between mobile and desktop processors. Our tests have shown that only applications that rely on number-crunching - such as rendering and video editing - still benefit from the raw horsepower of a Pentium D. If those tasks aren't a vital part of your everyday life, you should choose a Core.

This means the hulking, humming beasts that currently loiter on desks around the land will gradually be replaced by silent, compact machines. How quickly is impossible to predict, but signs of an impending invasion came at January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. There, Intel's chief executive unveiled the latest generation of home entertainment 'Viiv' PCs - some of them were even stylish.

These aren't just ordinary PCs, though. Just as Centrino has become indelibly linked to buying a laptop, Intel hopes Viiv will come to be synonymous with consumer PCs. And to its credit, it isn't just sticking a Viiv badge onto a selection of PCs and declaring them great to watch TV on. It's partnering with the likes of Sky, Napster and Ubisoft to ensure that when people unpack their new PC there's something to do with it.

So when you browse through the Windows Media Center interface for the first time, you'll actually find there's content there - you'll enter a world of on-demand TV, that lets you watch the programmes you want to watch when you want to watch them. A world of on-demand games, of on-demand music. As ever, it will take time to get every major company on board, but it promises a whole new way to be entertained.

This all means that, probably for the first time, a 2Mb broadband connection will seem a little slow. That's just one of the reasons why 2006 looks set to be the year of super-fast broadband, and we reveal plenty more reasons - not to mention which ISPs provide the best connections and service - on p124. And it could even be cheaper than your current contract...