Author Archives: Eric Hale

Another great year

on December 31, 2015

A lot of great stuff happened this year! In addition to releasing new versions of the benchmarks, videos, infographics, and white papers, we released our first-ever German UI and sponsored our first student partnership at North Carolina State University. We visited three continents to promote the XPRTs and saw XPRT results published in six of them (we’re still working on Antarctica).

Perhaps most exciting, we reached our fifth anniversary. Users have downloaded or run the XPRTs over 100,000 times.

As great as the year has been, we are sprinting into 2016. Though I can’t talk about them yet, there are some big pieces of news coming soon. Even sooner, I will be at CES next week. If you would like to talk about the XPRTs or the future of benchmarking, let me know and we’ll find a time to meet.

Whatever your holiday traditions are, I hope you are having a great holiday season. Here’s wishing you all the best in 2016!

Eric

Posted in Benchmarking, Benchmarks in general, BenchmarkXPRT development community, CES, Collaborative benchmark development, Future of performance evaluation, German, History of benchmarking |

Auf Deutsche

By Eric Hale

on December 17, 2015

Early next week, we will update WebXPRT by adding a German UI. This brings the number of available languages to three. WebXPRT has had a Simplified Chinese UI for a while, but you had to click a link on the WebXPRT page to get it. The new version removes that limitation, and lets you select Simplified Chinese, English, or German from the UI.

We’re working on getting WebXPRT to automatically detect the language of your device, but for now, the UI defaults to English.

We would like to expand the range of languages the XPRTs support over time. This is an area where you can help. If you’d like to see your language represented and are willing to help with translation, please let us know.

I know it’s the holiday season, but remember that CES will be here before we know it. I’m really looking forward to seeing the show, and I may have some big news to talk about while I’m there! If you’re planning to be at CES, send a message and let’s find a time to meet!

We will not have a blog post next week. Happy holidays!

Eric

Last week in the XPRTs
We published the December 2015 BenchmarkXPRT Development Community newsletter.
We added one new BatteryXPRT ’14 result.
We added nine new MobileXPRT ’13 results.
We added one new MobileXPRT ’15 result.
We added four new WebXPRT ’15 results.

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT development community, CES, Collaborative benchmark development, German, Simplified Chinese, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 2015, What makes a good benchmark? |

Nebula Wolf

By Eric Hale

on December 10, 2015

A couple of months ago, we talked about the senior project we sponsored with North Carolina State University. We asked a small team of students to take a crack at implementing a game that we could use as the basis of a benchmark test.

Last Friday, the project culminated with a presentation at the annual Posters and Pies event.

The team gave a great presentation, and I was impressed by how much they accomplished in 3 months. They implemented a game that they called Nebula Wolf – the mascot for NC State is a wolf. It’s a space-themed rail shooter. You can play the game, or click a button to run a script for benchmarking purposes. In the scripted mode, Nebula Wolf unlocks the frame rate so the device can run at full speed.

Over the next couple of weeks, we’re going to be testing Nebula Wolf, digging into the code and getting a deeper understanding of what the team did. We’re hoping to make the game available on our web site soon.

Tomorrow, AJ, Brien, and Rachel will present one last time, here at PT. It’s been a real pleasure working with them. I wish them all good luck as they finish college and start their careers.

Eric

Posted in Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking, Collaborative benchmark development, Future of performance evaluation |

Looking forward

By Eric Hale

on December 3, 2015

If you’re in the US, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving, and that you survived Black Friday!

On Monday, we released the second community preview for TouchXPRT 2016 (CP2). It detects the issue we described last week, by checking whether the Create Slideshow scenario completes correctly, and alerts you if it does not. We’re continuing to investigate this issue and will let you know as soon as we have more information. Results from CP2 are comparable to results from CP1. Please let us know if you have any questions or problems.

In other news, I’ll be at CES 2016 in Las Vegas in January. I can’t wait! We’re going to have some big news after the first of the year. I can’t say anything about it yet, but I’m looking forward to discussing it with folks there. If you’re planning to be at CES, send me a message, and let’s meet!

Eric

Posted in CES, Community Preview, TouchXPRT 2016, TouchXPRT development process, TouchXPRT release cycle, Trade Shows, Windows 10 |

TouchXPRT 2016 Community Preview 2 is available

By Eric Hale

on December 1, 2015

Today we are releasing TouchXPRT 2016 Community Preview 2 (CP 2). As we discussed in the blog, some systems with newer AMD graphics drivers have trouble rendering the Create Slideshow from Photos output video. CP 2 includes a validation feature that produces an error when this problem occurs. This is the only change from the first community preview.

As with all community previews, TouchXPRT 2016 CP 2 is available only to community members. Members may download the preview from the TouchXPRT tab in the Members’ Area.

For more details about TouchXPRT 2016, please consult the release notes for further details (login required).

After you try out CP 2, please send us your comments. Either post them to the forum or mail them to BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com. If you send us information that’s relevant to the entire community, we may post an anonymous version of your comments to the forum.

Thanks for your participation!

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT development community, Community Preview, Performance benchmarking, TouchXPRT, TouchXPRT 2016, TouchXPRT development process, Windows 10 |

News about TouchXPRT

By Eric Hale

on November 25, 2015

Some community members reported that, on some systems, the TouchXPRT Create Slideshow from Photos workload was taking a long time to complete. We found that the output video does not correctly render when this happens. This affects both TouchXPRT 2014 and TouchXPRT 2016.

So far we have only seen this problem on systems with some of the newer AMD graphics drivers. It appears that older AMD drivers and drivers from other vendors do not trigger this behavior.

We are still working to identify the root cause but, in the interim, we are updating the workload to verify its output. This would allow TouchXPRT to detect this problem when it occurs and report an error. We expect to have new CP of TouchXPRT 2016 with this fix next week.

For those in the US, I hope you enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday. Among the many things I’m thankful for this year is all the help and support from the community. We could not do it without you.

Eric

Posted in Community Preview, TouchXPRT, TouchXPRT 2014, TouchXPRT 2016, TouchXPRT release cycle |

Author Archives: Eric Hale

Another great year

Auf Deutsche

Nebula Wolf

Looking forward

TouchXPRT 2016 Community Preview 2 is available

News about TouchXPRT

Check out the other XPRTs: