BenchmarkXPRT Blog banner

Category: Battery life

Polishing the chrome

Early next week, we’ll be releasing an update for CrXPRT that addresses a couple of issues. First, the individual workload scores were not always discarding outliers correctly, which could have had a small effect on those scores. The update handles outliers correctly. Because the overall score is calculated separately from the individual workload scores, this change does not affect the overall score or battery life score, and results from previous builds are still comparable.

The update also checks the duration for each battery life test iteration. This helps detect conditions that could invalidate the test, such as someone manually putting a test system to sleep.

Finally, the update checks between iterations to see if the Chromebook is plugged in during the test. If so, CrXPRT will report an error and stop the test. This can potentially save time that would otherwise be lost on an invalid run.

These are small changes, but they will help make CrXPRT a more robust benchmark.

In other news, we’ve been asking members of the community if they would care to share their experiences and thoughts on the blog.  We’re delighted that people are interested, and we’ve already received our first guest post that we’ll be publishing in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, if you’d like to write a post, or just want to share your thoughts on the XPRTs, please let us know!

Eric

An updated BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android build is available

Today we’re releasing a new build of BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android (v101) at BatteryXPRT.com and the Google Play store. This build addresses issues we saw with the Create Slideshow Workload when testing on Android 5 devices. The tests have not changed, so new scores are comparable with previous BatteryXPRT scores.

Although the patch works on the majority of Android 5 devices, we are continuing to investigate intermittent failures on the Nexus 9. Please see the Monday’s blog post, for details.

Click here to download the new BatteryXPRT installer (317 MB) directly from our site.

For users who have limited bandwidth or trouble accessing the Google Play store, downloading the APK files (16.9 MB total) may make installation easier.

Download the updated BatteryXPRT APK (2.7 MB) directly from our site.

Download the updated BatteryXPRT Tests APK (14.2 MB) directly from our site.

If you have any questions about the update or any other XPRT-related topic, feel free to contact us at BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

Comment on this post in the forums

An update for BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android

For those of you in the US, I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving.

A couple of weeks ago, we updated MobileXPRT so that it would run correctly on Android 5 (Android L) devices. Later this week, we will be updating BatteryXPRT as well. The current BatteryXPRT build doesn’t work with Android 5 due to failures of the Create Slideshow workload. This is the same workload failure we fixed with an updated MobileXPRT build.

The new build greatly improves things. We successfully tested the new build on an array of Android 5 and 4.4 devices with no failures. However, we have seen the new build of BatteryXPRT return intermittent errors during the Create Photo Collage and Apply Photo Effects workloads when testing on the Nexus 9.

Because the error on the Nexus 9 is intermittent, it’s possible to get results from some runs. These results are still valid.

We haven’t seen this failure on any device other than the Nexus 9, but cannot guarantee that there aren’t others. If you see any other failures, or have any questions, please contact us.

We’re currently working on a solution for this problem. We will, as always, keep you informed.

Eric

Comment on this post in the forums

Getting the most from the XPRTs

BatteryXPRT can measure battery life three ways: in Airplane mode, Wireless connection mode, and Cellular connection mode.

A couple of weeks ago, Tom’s Hardware ran a review of the NVIDIA Shield Tablet that shows the value of being able to compare different ways of using your device. The review gave results for two of the three modes, Airplane mode and Wireless mode, for the devices under test. While all devices had lower battery life in Wireless mode, the NVIDIA Shield Tablet showed a much larger difference between the two modes than other devices.

The review offers some technical reasons why this might be so. However, the review also includes a sentence that goes to the heart of our mission to provide easy-to-use tools that reflect real-world usage and can be used in a variety of ways. As the reviewer at Tom’s Hardware noted: “I’ve also noticed what I would consider excessive power drain during standby with Wi-Fi left on, which subjectively corroborates these results.” That is what we like to hear!

We are always looking for ways to make our tools more versatile and useful. If you have ideas, please let us know!

Eric

Comment on this post in the forums

CrXPRT is here!

Today we are releasing the CrXPRT 2014 Community Preview (CP1). As mentioned in a previous post, CrXPRT contains performance and battery life tests. The performance suite includes five scenarios utilizing Web browsing and JavaScript workloads, plus Portable Native Client (PNaCl) and WebGL-based scenarios. The battery life test incorporates all of the performance workloads and adds video playback, audio playback, and HTML5 gaming scenarios.

The battery life test in CP1 builds on the lessons we learned from developing BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android. In fact, we’ve been able to improve on the testing time. BatteryXPRT 2014 requires 5.5 hours to estimate battery life; CP1 can estimate battery life in only 3.5 hours. The battery test in CP1 still requires the device be put in developer mode, so we’re investigating the new Chrome OS battery status APIs. We hope these will make it possible to remove this restriction in a future release.

The estimates for battery life are generally pretty accurate. However, we have seen runs where the battery life results were much higher than expected. We are continuing to investigate this. If you see an anomalous result, please let us know. It is worth noting that the performance scores have been very consistent.

Because this is a community preview, you have to be a community member to download it. However, joining is very easy.

Check out the new CrXPRT, and let us know what you think!

Eric

Comment on this post in the forums 

Seeing the whole picture

In past posts, we’ve discussed how people tend to focus on hardware differences when comparing performance or battery life scores between systems, but software factors such as OS version, choice of browser, and background activity often influence benchmark results on multiple levels.

For example, AnandTech recently published an article explaining how a decision by Google Chrome developers to increase Web page rendering times may have introduced a tradeoff between performance and battery life. To increase performance, Chrome asks Windows to use 1ms interrupt timings instead of the default 15.6ms timing. Unlike other applications that wait for the default timing, Chrome ends up getting its work done more often.

The tradeoff for that increased performance is that waking up the OS more frequently can diminish the effectiveness of a system’s innate power-saving attributes, such as a tick-less kernel and timer coalescing in Windows 8, or efficiency innovations in a new chip architecture. In this case, because of the OS-level interactions between Chrome and Windows, a faster browser could end up having a greater impact on battery life than might initially be suspected.

The article discusses the limitations of their test in detail, specifically with regards to Chrome 36 not being able to natively support the same HiDPI resolution as the other browsers, but the point we’re drawing out here is that accurate testing involves taking all relevant factors into consideration. People are used to the idea that changing browsers may impact Web performance, but not so much is said about a browser’s impact on battery life.

Justin

Comment on this post in the forums

Check out the other XPRTs:

Forgot your password?