For as fast as things move in the PC industry, some things have remained essentially the same.

For over 20 years, the PC industry has evaluated its platforms using one principal measurement: speed. Faster is better, end of story. Or is it? Today’s PC can deliver capabilities that PCs of ten years ago could have only dreamed of. Today, many of the PC’s most exciting new applications deliver video and audio content all over the home. In this media-centric environment, a platform evaluation approach that obsesses only on speed simply cannot tell consumers what they really want to know: what can this platform do well for me?

The Intel® Digital Home Capabilities Tool (Intel® DHCAT) is an innovative platform evaluation tool for home media PCs that breaks new ground in the well-worked field of PC platform evaluation, providing a complete and intuitively useful view of the systems under inspection. Unlike existing tools, DHCAT measures system capabilities and reports its findings in terms that really matter to users, as functions of their own experience quality. While the tool will not be open-source, it has been and will continue to be developed transparently to the industry, with its scoring system and design guidelines exposed for public discussion and debate. This article is one step in that disclosure process.