7. Concluding Postscript

Although we've taken issue with some of the assumptions that appear to govern DHCAT, and some of the software elements it includes, we have to express our thanks to Intel for the degree of support and information they provided as we worked through the various assessment tests. The Intel Capabilities Forum staff, especially Ramesh Jaladi and Krzysztof Wozniak, but also Dave Salvator, went as far above and beyond the call of support duty as anybody could ever wish for. In addition to sending engineers out to look over our test lab in the field, Intel also provided software and licenses for their ViiV materials, and covered our needs for Nero and CyberLink elements as well. When we came up short on disk drives to populate our test machines, they even lent us a couple of those, too. There's no doubting Intel's commitment to DHCAT and to digital home entertainment computing. We expect to see it play a role in helping us to understand media PC capabilities for some time to come.

Reading The DHCAT Results Report

Let's take a quick drive through one of the DHCAT results reports, using the information reported for an AMD 4800+ PC with a Blu-ray DVD drive installed. We'll march through the sections in order of appearance, labeling each one with the bold face title that appears in the document for which we've provided a link:

Platform Capabilities Score: 93
This is an overall numerical score for the unit tested, where scores range from 0 to as high as 200. The highest score we've ever seen is a 132; the lowest is a 76. Platform Capabilities Matrix:
This shows results for each item in all six of the testing scenarios for DHCAT, where a green square indicates Excellent or passing results, a yellow square indicates Good or acceptable results, and a red square indicates Poor or failing results. Notice how many red squares appear here, and in all the other HTPCs for which we report results (or, where this section is missing from the results, scroll down to the details section for the scenarios to see the same color coding used to label more detailed results reporting. Legend:
Provide text explanations for all the visual symbols and colors codes used in the capabilities matrix results. Project Configuration:
Documents the name of the test, the time it was started, the number of iterations performed, and supplies the text description provided at the time the test was started up. System Information:
Documents the CPU (Processor), OS, motherboard, memory, graphics card, sound card or circuitry, storage devices, and logical drives present on the test machine. Digital Home Elements Information:
Identifies video encoders and decoders, audio sound card and devices, SDTV and HDTV tuners, video players, media server share(s), content protection present or absent, and optical drive info. Platform Capability Details:
This is where all the scenario results are repeated with a great deal more detail about what kinds of components are exercised, usage primitives (tasks and activities in the terms we used in this story), and related DHCAT results reported. These essentially repeat the small colored squares shown in the capabilities matrix at the head of the report, with a little more explanation and detail to put them into context. Where numerical results are provided instead of color code rankings, associated superscripts indicate speed-up factors observed (all of ours have a 1 superscript, which means no speed-up was measurable). Platform Capabilities
Provides aggregated information about overall results, including the number of primitives with results ranked as Excellent, Good, Acceptable, Poor, and Fail, plus a measure of total speed-up time observed (the sum of all numerical values reported).

Reading all the way through the DHCAT results, especially digging through the Platform Capability Details section, is where you really start to appreciate what it can tell you.

Join our discussion on this topic