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Category: Benchmarking

Out with the old, and in with the new

What we now know as the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community started many years ago as the HDXPRT Development Community forum. At the time, the community was much smaller, and HDXPRT was our only benchmark. When a member wanted to run the benchmark, they submitted a request, and then received an installation DVD in the mail.

With hundreds of members, more than a half dozen active benchmarks, and the online availability of all our tools, the current community is a much different organization. Instead of the original forum, most of our interaction with members takes place through the blog, the monthly newsletter, direct email, and our social media accounts. Because of the way the community has changed, and because the original forum is no longer very active, we believe that the time and resources that we devote to maintaining the forum could be better spent on building and maintaining other community assets. To that end, we’ve decided to end support for the original BenchmarkXPRT forum.

As always, community members’ voices are an important consideration in what we do. If you have any questions or concerns about the decision to close down the original forum, please let us know as soon as possible.

On another note, we want to thank the community members who’ve participated in the HDXPRT 4 Community Preview. Testing has gone well, and we’re planning to release HDXPRT 4 to the public towards the end of next week!

Justin

Engaging AI

In December, we wrote about our recent collaboration with students from North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science. We challenged the students to create a software console that includes an intuitive user interface, computes a performance metric, and uploads results to our database. The specific objective was to make it easy for testers to configure and run an implementation of the TensorFlow framework. In general, we hoped that the end product would model some of the same basic functions we plan to implement with AIXPRT, our machine-learning performance evaluation tool, currently under development.

The students did an outstanding job, and we hope to incorporate some of their work into AIXPRT in the future. We’ve been calling the overall project “Engaging AI” because it produced a functional tool that can help users interact with TensorFlow, and it was the first time that the students had an opportunity to work with AI tools. You can read more details on the Engaging AI page. We also have a new video that describes the project, including the new skillsets our students acquired to achieve success.

engaging-ai-vid

Finally, interested BenchmarkXPRT Development Community members can access to the project’s source code and additional documentation on our XPRT Experiments page. We hope you’ll check it out!

Justin

Principled Technologies and the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community release MobileXPRT 3, a free performance evaluation app for Android devices

Durham, NC, February 1— Principled Technologies and the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community have released MobileXPRT 3, a free app that gives objective information about how well a tablet, smartphone, or any other Android device handles common tasks. Anyone can go to MobileXPRT.com to compare existing performance results on a variety of devices, and to download the app for themselves. MobileXPRT 3 is also available in the Google Play Store.

MobileXPRT 3 is a benchmark that evaluates the capabilities of Android devices by running six performance scenarios (Apply Photo Effects, Create Photo Collages, Create Slideshow, Encrypt Personal Content, Detect Faces to Organize Photos, and Scan Receipts for Spreadsheet). It also provides an overall measure by generating a single performance score. “MobileXPRT is a popular, easy-to-use benchmark run by manufacturers, tech journalists, and consumers all around the world,” said Bill Catchings, co-founder of Principled Technologies, which administers the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community. “We believe that MobileXPRT 3 is a great addition to MobileXPRT’s legacy of providing relevant and reliable performance data for Android devices.”

MobileXPRT is part of the BenchmarkXPRT suite of performance evaluation tools, which includes WebXPRT, TouchXPRT, CrXPRT, BatteryXPRT, and HDXPRT. The XPRTs help users get the facts before they buy, use, or evaluate tech products such as computers, tablets, and phones.

To learn more about the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, go to www.BenchmarkXPRT.com.

About Principled Technologies, Inc.
Principled Technologies, Inc. is a leading provider of technology marketing and learning & development services. It administers the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community.

Principled Technologies, Inc. is located in Durham, North Carolina, USA. For more information, please visit www.PrincipledTechnologies.com.

Company Contact
Justin Greene

BenchmarkXPRT Development Community
Principled Technologies, Inc.
1007 Slater Road, Ste. 300
Durham, NC 27703

BenchmarkXPRTsupport@PrincipledTechnologies.com

MobileXPRT 3 is here!

We’re excited to announce that MobileXPRT 3 is now available to the public! MobileXPRT 3 is the latest version of our popular tool for evaluating the performance of Android devices. The BenchmarkXPRT Development Community has been using a community preview for several weeks, but now anyone can run the tool and publish their results.

Compatible with systems running Android 5.0 and above, MobileXPRT 3 includes the same performance workloads as MobileXPRT 2015 (Apply Photo Effects, Create Photo Collages, Create Slideshow, Encrypt Personal Content, and Detect Faces to Organize Photos), plus a new optical character recognition-based workload called Scan Receipts for Spreadsheet.

MobileXPRT 3 is available at MobileXPRT.com and on the Google Play Store. Alternatively, you can download the app using either of the links below:



After trying out MobileXPRT 3, please submit your scores here and send any comments to BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com. To see test results from a variety of systems, go to MobileXPRT.com and click View Results, where you’ll find scores from a variety of Android devices. We look forward to seeing your results!

Justin

An update on the AIXPRT Request for Comments preview

As we approach the end of the original feedback window for the AIXPRT Request for Comments preview build, we want to update folks on the status of the project and what to expect in the coming weeks.

First, thanks to those who’ve downloaded the AIXPRT OpenVINO package and sent in their questions and comments. We value your feedback, and it’s instrumental in making AIXPRT a better tool. We’re currently working through some issues with the TensorFlow and TensorRT packages, and hope to add support for those to the RFC preview build repository very soon.

We’re also hoping to have a full-fledged community preview (CP) ready in mid to late February. Like our other community previews, the AIXPRT CP would be solid enough to allow folks to start quoting numbers. We typically make our benchmarks available to the general public four to six weeks after the community preview period begins, so if that schedule holds, it would place the public AIXPRT release around the end of March.

In light of the schedule described above, you still have time to gain access to the AIXPRT RFC preview build and give your feedback, so let us know if you’d like to check it out. The installation and testing process can take less than an hour, but getting everything properly set up can take a few tries. We are hard at work trying to make that process more straightforward. We welcome your input on all aspects of the benchmark, including workloads, ease of use, metrics, scores, and reporting.

Thanks for your help!

Justin

The HDXPRT 4 Community Preview is now available!

Today we’re releasing the HDXPRT 4 Community Preview (CP). Just like previous versions of HDXPRT, HDXPRT 4 uses trial versions of commercial applications to complete workload tasks. For some of those programs, such as Audacity and HandBrake, HDXPRT 4 includes installers in the HDXPRT installation package. For other programs, such as Adobe Photoshop Elements 2018 and CyberLink Media Espresso 7.5, users need to download the necessary installers prior to testing by using the links and instructions in the HDXPRT 4 User Manual.

In addition to the editing photos, editing music, and converting videos workloads from prior versions of the benchmark, HDXPRT 4 includes two new Photoshop Elements scenarios. The first utilizes an AI tool that corrects closed eyes in photos, and the second creates a single panoramic photo from seven separate photos.

HDXPRT 4 is compatible with systems running Windows 10, and the installation package is slightly smaller than previous versions at just over 4.7 GB.

Because this is a community preview, it is available only to community members, who may download the preview from the HDXPRT tab in the Members’ Area. Because we expect results from CP testing to be comparable to results from the general release, members may publish their CP test results.

After you try the CP, please send us your comments. If you send information that’s relevant to the entire community, we may post an anonymous version of your comments to the forum. Thanks for your participation!

Justin

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