Author Archives: Eric Hale

Lots of things are happening!

on April 9, 2015

The WebXPRT 2015 community preview hasn’t even been out two weeks yet, but there are already hundreds of runs in the database. If you haven’t checked it out yet, now is a good time! (login required)

As I mentioned last week, Bill and Justin are at Intel Developer Forum 2015 – Shenzhen. Here’s their home away from home this week.

Bill and Justin have been having a lot of good conversations and have found a lot of interest in an open development community. We’re looking forward to having even more members in Asia soon!

On Monday we released the CrXPRT white paper. If you want to know more about the concepts behind CrXPRT 2015, how it was developed, how the results are calculated, or anything else about CrXPRT, the white paper is a great place to start.
Finally, the MobileXPRT 2015 design document is coming in the next couple of weeks. What would you like to see in the next version of MobileXPRT? 64-bit support? New types of tests? Improvements to the UI? Everything is on the table. This is the time to make your voice heard!
Eric

Posted in CrXPRT, IDF, Principled Technologies, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 2015, White papers |

A couple of things

By Eric Hale

on April 2, 2015

We’ve heard about a couple of issues this week. The HDXPRT 2014 Convert Videos test uses the MediaEspresso application and requires hardware acceleration be configured. On some systems, this setting is not configuring automatically, which may result in lower scores. We’re working on a solution, but in the meantime there’s an easy workaround.

We’ve also found that some Chromebooks report extremely low battery use, as low as 0%, for the first couple iterations of the CrXPRT battery life test. This can cause CrXPRT to report results with a very wide confidence interval, with an interval greater than 15%. We’re looking at ways to detect and compensate for this. However, if you see results with a very wide confidence interval, we recommend that you use the rundown test.

In other news, we’ve been talking about Intel Developer Forum 2015 – Shenzhen for weeks, and the time is finally here! Bill and Justin get on the plane tomorrow. If you’d like to talk about the XPRTs, or any of PT’s other offerings, Bill and the team would be happy to meet with you!

Eric

Posted in Collaborative benchmark development, CrXPRT, Google Chrome, HDXPRT, IDF |

WebXPRT 2015 Community Preview is available!

By Eric Hale

on March 27, 2015

As we said yesterday, we’re releasing the community preview of a WebXPRT 2015 Community Preview. Members of the BenchmarkXPRT community can now run the community preview and publish results.

Run the community preview here.

After trying out the community preview, please send in your comments. Either post them to the forum or mail them to benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechnologies.com. If you mail information that’s of interest to the entire community, we may post an anonymous version of the comments to the forum.

Thanks for being part of the community,

Eric

Posted in Automation, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Chinese, Community Preview, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 2015 |

Finally!

By Eric Hale

on March 26, 2015

We’re releasing the community preview of WebXPRT 2015 tomorrow. We’re very excited that it’s finally here. In the past few weeks, we’ve discussed some of the new features in WebXPRT 2015, such as test automation, its new and improved tests, and its Chinese UI. We think you’re really going to enjoy the new WebXPRT.

The design document (login required) specifies that WebXPRT will contain an experimental workload. That workload is not in the community preview, although we plan for it to be in the general release. However, because any experimental workloads are not included in the overall score, this will not affect any results you generate.

We’re also investigating the use of the JavaScript navigator object to improve system disclosure, but we are still determining if we can get reliable enough information to display. So this information is not displayed in the community preview.

As with all the BenchmarkXPRT community previews, we’re not putting any publication restrictions on this preview release. Test at will, and publish your findings. We guarantee the results for the community preview will be comparable to results from the general release.

If you’re not a community member, join us and check out the new WebXPRT.

Eric

Posted in Automation, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Chinese, Collaborative benchmark development, Community Preview, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 2015 |

More power, more control

By Eric Hale

on March 19, 2015

As I said last week, the community preview for WebXPRT 2015 is coming up soon. One of the changes that will be exciting to anyone who does a lot of testing is that we made it simpler to automate WebXPRT tests.

WebXPRT 2015 will let you automatically select any set of tests you want to run. However, as always, you must run the entire suite of tests to get an overall score. Although the community preview will not include any experimental tests, the automation includes control for those future tests as well.

You may choose from several output formats: HTML table, XML, and CSV, or you can download the results as a text file.

Using the automation is simple: you just append the desired test parameters to the end of the URL. The format allows you to mix and match a lot of options, while still being very concise. The details will be in the release notes.

As people who test a lot of devices, we are very excited about this new capability.

Eric

Posted in Automation, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Collaborative benchmark development, Community Preview, Future of performance evaluation, Performance benchmarking, WebXPRT, What makes a good benchmark? |

Getting closer

By Eric Hale

on March 12, 2015

Mobile World Congress ended last week. If you’ve been following us on Twitter, you know that Bill had some really good meetings while he was there. That’s not to say that Bill didn’t have some fun too!

Next, we go to Intel Developer Forum 2015 – Shenzhen!

While Bill has been out of the country, we’ve been continuing to work on WebXPRT 2015. We’ve talked before about some of the improvements the new WebXPRT: new and more-demanding tests, on-screen descriptions of the tests, a progress indicator, and more. We’ve also given the UI a sleeker, more modern look. Also, WebXPRT 2015 will be the second XPRT to include a Chinese UI.

Testing has been going well. We have a few final tweaks to make but are expecting to release the community preview for WebXPRT 2015 in the next week or two. We’re really excited! I can’t wait to hear what you think of it.

Eric

Posted in IDF, Mobile World Congress, Simplified Chinese, Trade Shows, WebXPRT |

Author Archives: Eric Hale

Lots of things are happening!

A couple of things

WebXPRT 2015 Community Preview is available!

Finally!

More power, more control

Getting closer

Check out the other XPRTs: