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WebXPRT in PT reports

Mark Van Name
By Mark Van Name
on February 22, 2024

We don’t just make WebXPRT—we use it, too. If you normally come straight to BenchmarkXPRT.com or WebXPRT.com, you may not even realize that Principled Technologies (PT) does a lot more than just managing and administering the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community. We’re also the tech world’s leading provider of hands-on testing and related fact-based marketing services. As part of that work, we’re frequent WebXPRT users.

We use the benchmark when we test devices such as Chromebooks, desktops, mobile workstations, and consumer laptops for our clients. (You can see a lot of that work and many of our clients on our public marketing portfolio page.) We run the benchmark for the same reasons that others do—it’s a reliable and easy-to-use tool for measuring how well devices handle web browsing and other web work.

We also sometimes use WebXPRT simply because our clients request it. They request it for the same reason the rest of us like and use it: it’s a great tool. Regardless of job titles and descriptions, most laptop and tablet users surf the web and access web-based applications every day. Because WebXPRT is a browser benchmark, higher scores on it could indicate that a device may provide a superior online experience.

Here are just a few of the recent PT reports that used WebXPRT:

  • In a project for Dell, we compared the performance of a Dell Latitude 7340 Ultralight to that of a 13-inch Apple MacBook Air (2022).
  • In this study for HP, we compared the performance of an HP ZBook Firefly G10, an HP ZBook Power G10, and an HP ZBook Fury G10.
  • Finally, in a set of comparisons for Lenovo, we evaluated the system performance and end-user experience of eight Lenovo ThinkBook, ThinkCentre, and ThinkPad systems along with their Apple counterparts.

All these projects, and many more, show how a variety of companies rely on PT—and on WebXPRT—to help buyers make informed decisions. P.S. If we publish scores from a client-commissioned study in the WebXPRT 4 results viewer, we will list the source as “PT”, because we did the testing.

By Mark L. Van Name and Justin Greene

Posted in Apple, benchmark, Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking, Benchmarking computing devices, BenchmarkXPRT, browser performance, Browser-based benchmarks, Chromebooks, Dell, HP, Laptops, Lenovo, Performance benchmarking, Principled Technologies, PT, Web-based testing, WebXPRT, webxprt 4 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Mobile World Congress 2023: Infrastructure led the way

Mark Van Name
By Mark Van Name
on March 3, 2023

When the tech industry is at its best, a virtuous cycle of capabilities and use cases chases its own tail to produce ever-better tech for us all. Faster CPUs drive new usage models, which in turn emerge and swamp the CPUs, which then must get faster. Better screens make us want higher-quality video, which requires more bandwidth to deliver and causes us to desire even better displays. Apps connect us in more ways, but those connections require more bandwidth, which leads to new apps that can take advantage of those faster connections. And on and on.

Put a finger on the cycle at any given moment, and you’ll see that while all the elements are in motion, some are the stars of the moment. To keep the cycle going, it’s crucial for these areas to improve the most. At Mobile World Congress 2023 (#MWC23), that distinction belonged to infrastructure. Yes, some new mobile phones were on display, Lenovo showed off new ThinkPads, and other mobile devices were in abundance, but as I walked the eight huge halls, I couldn’t help but notice the heavy emphasis on infrastructure.

5G, for example, is real now—but it’s far from everywhere. Telecom providers have to figure out how to profitably build out the networks necessary to support it. The whole industry must solve the problems of delivering 5G at huge scale, handle the traffic increases it will bring, switch and route the data, and ultimately make sure the end devices can take full advantage of that data. Management and security remain vital whenever data is flying around, so those softer pieces of infrastructure also matter greatly.

Inevitably and always, to know if we as an industry are meeting these challenges, we must measure performance—both in the raw speed sense and in the broader sense of the word. Are we seeing the full bandwidth we expect? Are devices handling the data properly and at speed? Where’s the bottleneck now? Are we delivering on the schedules we promised? Questions such as these are key concerns in every tech cycle—and some of them are exactly what the XPRTs focus on.

As we improve our infrastructure, we hope to see the benefits at a personal level. When you’re using a device—whether it’s a smart watch, a mobile phone, or a laptop—you need it to do its job well, respond to you quickly, and show you what you want when you want it. When your device makes you wait, it can be helpful to know if the bandwidth feeding data to the device is the bottleneck or if the device simply can’t keep up with the flow of data it’s receiving. The XPRTs can help you figure out what’s going on, and they will continue to be useful and important as the tech cycle spins on. If history is our guide, the infrastructure focus of MWC23 will lead to greater capabilities that require even better devices down the line. We look forward to testing them.

Posted in 5G, benchmark, Benchmark metrics, BenchmarkXPRT, Future of performance evaluation, Laptops, Mobile devices, Mobile World Congress, Performance benchmarking, Phones, Trade Shows | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

More, faster, better: The future according to Mobile World Congress 2019

Mark Van Name
By Mark Van Name
on March 7, 2019

More is more data, which the trillions of devices in the coming Internet of Things will be pumping through our air into our (computing) clouds in hitherto unseen quantities.

Faster is the speed at which tomorrow’s 5G networks will carry this data—and the responses and actions from our automated assistants (and possibly overlords).

Better is the quality of the data analysis and recommendations, thanks primarily to the vast army of AI-powered analytics engines that will be poring over everything digital the planet has to say.

Swimming through this perpetual data tsunami will be we humans and our many devices, our laptops and tablets and smartphones and smart watches and, ultimately, implants. If we are to believe the promise of this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona—and of course I do want to believe it, who wouldn’t?—the result of all of this will be a better world for all humanity, no person left behind. As I walked the show floor, I could not help but feel and want to embrace its optimism.

The catch, of course, is that we have a tremendous amount of work to do between where we are today and this fabulous future.

We must, for example, make sure that every computing node that will contribute to these powerful AI programs is up to the task. From the smartphone to the datacenter, AI will end up being a very distributed and very demanding workload. That’s one of the reasons we’ve been developing AIXPRT. Without tools that let us accurately compare different devices, the industry won’t be able to keep delivering the levels of performance improvements that we need to realize these dreams.

We must also think a lot about how to accurately measure all other aspects of our devices’ performance, because the demands this future will place on them are going to be significant. Fortunately, the always evolving XPRT family of tools is up to the task.

The coming 5G revolution, like all tech leaps forward before it, will not come evenly. Different 5G devices will end up behaving differently, some better and some worse. That fact, plus our constant and growing reliance on bandwidth, suggests that maybe the XPRT community should turn its attention to the task of measuring bandwidth. What do you think?

One thing is certain: we at the Benchmark XPRT Development Community have a role to play in building the tools necessary to test the tech the world will need to deliver on the promise of this exciting trade show. We look forward to that work.

Posted in 5G, AI, AIXPRT, Automation, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Datacenter, Future of performance evaluation, Internet of things, IoT, Machine learning, Mobile devices, Mobile World Congress, Networking, Performance of computing devices, Phones, Tablets, Trade Shows | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , |

MWC18 and technology on the brink

Mark Van Name
By Mark Van Name
on March 8, 2018

This year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona bristled with technologies on the brink of superstardom.  The long-awaited 5G high-speed mobile standard again dominated the conversations, and is one year closer to creating a world of high-speed connections that will make possible mobile usages we’ve only begun to discover.  Intelligent, connected cars promise a self-driving and highly interconnected automotive experience that should ultimately make driving better for all of us.  Artificial intelligence, already a star, showed glimmers of its vast and still barely tapped potential.  In keeping with the show’s name, mobile devices of all sorts proved that phones and tablets and laptops are nowhere near done, with new models and capabilities available all over the many halls that comprised the MWC campus.

Each of those technologies will continue to evolve rapidly over the coming years, and each will create new opportunities for us all to benefit.  Those opportunities will appear both in ways we understand now—faster connections and quicker devices, for example—and in fashions we don’t yet understand.  The new benefits will lead to new usage models, change the ways we interact with the world, and create whole new markets.  (When the first smartphones appeared, they changed photography forever, but that wasn’t their primary goal.)  These new technologies will help us in ways we can now only glimpse.

These changes and new capabilities will breed both competition and, inevitably, confusion.  How are we to know which of the new products deliver the best implementations of these technologies heading toward stardom, and how are we to know when to upgrade to new generations of these products?

Answering those questions, and clarifying some of the confusing aspects of the always shifting tech market, are the reasons the XPRT community and tools exist.  New tech creates new usage models that require new tools to assess–XPRT tools.

If there’s one last lesson I learned from MWC18, it’s that our work is only just beginning.  The new technologies that are on the brink today will become superstars soon, and we’ll be there with the tools you need to assess and compare them.

Mark

Posted in 5G, AI, Automated cars, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Future of performance evaluation, Mobile World Congress, Mobile World Congress, Trade Shows |

VR and AR at Mobile World Congress 2017

Mark Van Name
By Mark Van Name
on March 16, 2017

Spotting the virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) demos at the recent Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona was easy: all you had to do was look for the long queues of people waiting to put on a headset and see another world. Though the demos ranged from games to simulated roller-coaster rides to simple how-to tools, the interest of the crowd was always high. A lot of the attraction was clearly due to the tools’ relative novelty, but many people seemed focused on using the technologies to create commercially viable products.

Both VR and AR involve a great deal of graphics and data movement, so they can be quite computationally demanding. Right now, that’s not a problem, because most applications and demos are hooked directly to powerful computers. As these technologies become more pervasive, however, they’re going to find their way into our devices, which will almost certainly do some of the processing even as the bulk of the work happens on servers in the cloud. The better the AR and VR experiences our devices can support, the happier we’re likely to be with those technologies.

Along with the crowds at MWC, many of us in the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community are enthusiastic about VR and AR, which is why we’ve been monitoring these fields for some time. We’ve even worked with a group of NC State University students to produce a sample VR workload. If you have thoughts on how we might best support VR and AR, please contact us. Meanwhile, we’ll continue to track both closely and work to get the XPRTs ready to measure how well devices handle these technologies.

Mark

Posted in AR, Augmented reality, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Mobile World Congress, North Carolina State University, Trade Shows, Virtual reality, VR Demo |

Mobile World Congress 2017 and the territories ahead

Mark Van Name
By Mark Van Name
on March 2, 2017

Walking the halls of this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC)—and, once again, I walked by every booth in every one of them—it was clear that mobile technology is expanding faster than ever into more new tech territories than ever before.

On the device front, cameras and camera quality have become a pitched battleground, with mobile phone makers teaming with camera manufacturers to give us better and better images and video. This fight is far from over, too, because vendors are exploring many different ways to improve mobile phone camera quality. Quick charging is a hot new trend we can expect to hear more about in the days to come. Of course, apps and their performance continue to matter greatly, because if you can do it from any computer, you better be able to do at least some of it from your phone.

The Internet of Things (IoT) grabbed many headlines, with vendors still selling more dreams than reality, but some industries living this future now. The proliferation of IoT devices will result, of course, in massive increases in the amount of data flowing through the world’s networks, which in turn will require more and more computing power to analyze and use. That power will need to be everywhere, from massive datacenters to the device in your hand, because the more data you have, the more you’ll want to customize it to your particular needs.

Similarly, AI was a major theme of the show, and it’s also likely to suck up computing cycles everywhere. The vast majority of the work will, of course, end up in datacenters, but some processing is likely to be local, particularly in situations, such as real-time translation, where we can’t afford significant comm delays.

5G, the next big step in mobile data speeds, was everywhere, with most companies seeming to agree the new standard was still years away–but also excited about what will be possible. When you can stream 4K movies to your phone wirelessly while simultaneously receiving and customizing analyses of your company’s IoT network, you’re going to need a powerful, sophisticated device running equally powerful and sophisticated apps.

Everywhere I looked, the future was bright—and complicated, and likely to place increasing demands on all of our devices. We’ll need guides as we find our paths through these new territories and as we determine the right device tools for our jobs, so the need for the XPRTs will only increase. I look forward to seeing where we, the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, take them next.

Mark

Posted in 4K, 5G, AI, Future of performance evaluation, Internet of things, IoT, Mobile data, Mobile devices, Mobile World Congress, Mobile World Congress, Phones, Trade Shows |

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