2. DHCAT At Ground Level: Six Scenarios, 24 Assessments

Each scenario consists of from three to five individual assessments, where each assessment seeks to capture some aspect of a system’s media handling capability and performance at the task or tasks involved. Each is named to describe its role in overall assessment.

In the following table, we summarize this data, to describe what happens during each assessment for all six scenarios.

Intel presents all of this information effectively in a legend that appears in one of the DHCAT results screens.

By now, we hope that the real emphasis in these assessments is clear: each scenario starts out with a single related activity that’s easy to accomplish, then piles on parallel tasks to give media PCs a serious workout. Our first batch of machines didn’t do too well when we ran them through DHCAT’s paces, and led to the question "What kind of PC does it take to deliver what DHCAT really needs?"

As you look at the scenarios, most involve at least two parallel tasks, and some involve as many as four. We couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps four CPU cores might provide a serious advantage, but also had to believe that brisk memory access, speedy hard disks and fast bus speeds would also help with the intensive I/O that characterizes most of the DHCAT assessments, especially those where numerous multiple activities are conducted in parallel. We also wanted to run DHCAT on the same hardware under both Windows XP (actually Windows Media Center Edition 2005, which is essentially an augmented version of Windows XP post SP2 vintage) and Windows Vista (we used Premium Edition, so as to provide maximum bells and whistles).