We’re here to challenge assumptions, ask thorny questions, and hopefully with your help, find a lot of right answers.

By Dave Salvator

More than anything else, this web site is a conversation. A conversation about the how and the why of measuring PC platforms.

Many tech enthusiast sites are in the business of reviewing technologies and products, and they do a great job of that. That’s the “what” – which platform performs well on which benchmark. That’s a tremendously important endeavor, and one that’s been going on for over two decades. Tech web sites have been a great continuation of these efforts, and we want to see them thrive. We’re not here to compete with them.

What we’re here to talk about is the how and the why of platform evaluation: We want to look at the new, cool things people are doing with their PCs, and figure out the best way to test a platform that enables these new usages. How do we build better benchmarks and methodologies to measure those new, cool things? What are the right ways to measure performance and capabilities, and just as importantly, what are the wrong ways to measure them? That’s what we’re here to talk about.

But we’re not here because we like to hear ourselves talk. We have ideas on these subjects, but we want to engage the industry, and the enthusiasts that drive it in a conversation to move our understanding of platform evaluation forward.

Is this site Intel-sponsored? Yes. Are we one of the guys being measured using these different methodologies? You bet. Do we think we have all the right answers already figured out? No. And that’s why we’re here.

There are places where a new approach makes sense, and conversely, there are places where the best methodology is the one the industry uses right now. The important thing is to recognize the difference. There’s no single way to test all platforms for all usage models any more than you can measure any versatile technology in just one way.

We believe that in several usage areas, a new approach that captures real people’s experiences is crucial to telling the whole story. And more importantly, these methodologies should tell consumers what they really want to know: what new platforms will enable them to do. And, how many of these new, cool things can a platform do at the same time?

To this end, we’re bringing a new set of tools to the industry to help advocate this approach. We call them Capabilities Assessment Tools, and we’ve focused our early efforts on two areas: Digital Home and Gaming. Why? Because these two areas are as much about experience as they are about any other metric.

On the site today, you can read about the Intel Gaming Capabilities Assessment Tool and the Intel Digital Home Capabilities Assessment Tool. We’ve also got an interview with Shervin Kheradpir, the director of Intel’s Performance Benchmarking and Competitive Analysis group, which provides more insight into the capabilities approach, and what it means for our industry.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be posting new articles about testing challenges, promising methodologies, and with your help, determine what we Intel-types call the Best Known Method (BKM) for testing different types of activities. But by far the most important part of this site is our forums, because that’s where you can shape the direction of this site, the tools we build, and indeed how our industry evaluates the PC platform today, and tomorrow.

As Editor-in-Chief of this site, I come to this project with 13 years as a technology journalist under my belt. I was a founding member of ExtremeTech, and spent five years as Computer Gaming World’s technical director. You name it, I’ve tested it: from servers to sound cards, and everything in between. I came to this project because I believe a number of our industry’s test practices need to evolve. This site, and the tools found here, are the first steps in what we hope will be a new and right direction for PC platform evaluation.

In addition to being our profession, this is our passion. We love this stuff. We’re tweakers and tinkerers. We’re gamers and home theater buffs. We have a great passion for technology and the evaluation of it. But we can’t do this by ourselves. We realize that the collective efforts of an industry will always surpass those of a single company. So today, we embark upon this endeavor, and we hope you’ll engage us on the merits of our ideas, challenging both us and the traditional test methodologies. And together, let’s do what our industry does best: innovate.