Displaying items by tag: Benchmarks

CES 2015 Las Vegas, NV – Intel Suite
Today we met up with the Intel crew to see what they are bringing to the market in 2015. Unlike previous years where the “big” news was about big CPUs and processing power, this year was about getting more power in a smaller package and also finding ways to compare products across multiple platforms.

Today is was announced that Futuremark would be “joining” Underwriters Laboratories. The standards group that most people in the US are familiar with his buying up the same benchmarking company that most of us have come to love and hate. According to both Futuremark and UL the acquisition is more like a partnership, it is just that one will fully own the other: “Today, we’re announcing a new partnership. One that will significantly strengthen Futuremark through increased investment in our people and products while protecting our independence and neutrality.”

The Consumer Electronics world is a very interesting one (it is also very entertaining). There is a ton of money and effort put into conveying a message for this or that product and service by people that, often, do not even know the technology they are talking about. On top of that there is a media presence that is made up of everything from the entry level user to the ubergeeks. You have blogs, news sites, review sites, company review sites, Amazon reviews, New Egg Blogs and customer reviews and more. It is almost impossible to get any real information out of what is broadcast on the internet these days. This is even more true when you have all of these sites rushing to get their article out first. This environment has created a situation where information is partially researched, based solely on synthetic tests or (even worse) is more opinion than fact.

There used to be a thing called truth in journalism. It meant that when you published an article you should at the very least check your facts if you are presenting it as “news” in the world of editorial articles things are different as an editorial is nearly always an opinion based article with some facts thrown in for furn. What has happened though is that with the introduction of Blogs, Fan Sites and other venues for information some of the fact checking has gone out the window in the effort to be the first to report on a juicy bit of news. When an article hits one of the big sites it often gets spread around the net and becomes the “truth” simply by means of repetition. We have watched this many times (and it is something that Apple’s PR and marketing thrive on).