Dacris Benchmarks 9.0 Future Revealed
For Immediate Release. February 25, 2020, Richmond Hill ON.
A Note from the Founder:
With the deployment of cloud infrastructure ever more ubiquitous in more and more organizations, IT departments are no longer devoting as much time and expense to building high-performance on-prem systems. As a result, the demand for desktop benchmarks, already a niche, is not growing. Furthermore, PC systems these days are incredibly powerful but performance has reached a plateau. The consensus is building that Moore's law is at an end, or at least at a major inflection point.
.NET has also advanced over the years, from version 3.5 which was already very capable, to 4.x (almost obsolete now) and now the upcoming 5.0 which will merge .NET Framework and .NET Core into one. We are carefully considering the opportunity of waiting for .NET 5.0 instead of jumping on the soon-to-be-obsolete 4.x.
With all that said, we are seriously considering cancelling the Dacris Benchmarks 9.0 beta program or at least postponing it until .NET 5.0 is out. One more factor in favour of cancellation is the now-obsolete XNA framework which can no longer be used to write a new 3D test. Therefore we must invest in writing a new WebGL 3D test and that is what makes this a major version.
We have decided to offer an optional extension of this beta program. If you would like to continue using the beta, please send your request by email to our email address. If we receive enough requests, we will extend the beta by another year. Otherwise, we will cancel and postpone the beta until .NET 5.0 comes out. We will also consider your requests when deciding on the final release timeline.
In addition, instead of releasing this software all at once and making our customers wait months for release, we have decided to split it off into components. The 3D test will be spun off as a separate product, and released on its own release schedule. Test results will be integrated into one platform, online, where users will be able to compare their systems.
The resulting SKUs we envision are: Dacris Benchmarks Desktop (.NET) (without 3D), Dacris Benchmarks 3D (WebGL), Dacris Benchmarks Browser (JavaScript), and possibly Dacris Benchmarks Azure (Cloud, .NET). All this plus a new result browser and community, Dacris Benchmarks Online. All of this will take years to develop, and will start with the release of .NET 5.0. In the meantime, our users can continue to run Dacris Benchmarks 8.1 through 2028 free of charge, until .NET 3.5 goes out of support.
I hope this sheds some light on our new vision for Dacris Benchmarks in 2020, and again all this will only happen if there is enough public interest / demand. Splitting it off into multiple SKUs will be very beneficial both from a profit perspective as well as a release planning perspective.
Sincerely,
Dan Tohatan
Dacris Software Inc.