Category: Benchmarking

Comparing open source and open development

on April 5, 2018

Why do we use open development when designing and building the XPRTs, and what’s the difference between our open development approach and traditional open-source methods? The terminology around these two models can be confusing, so we wanted to review some similarities and differences.

Why open development?

An open development approach helps encourage collaboration, innovation, and transparency. XPRT community members get involved in the development of each benchmark from the beginning:

They submit suggestions, questions, and concerns that inform the future design of the tools.
They view early proposals for new versions and contribute comments for the final design.
They suggest new workloads.
They have access to community previews (beta builds) of the tools.
They submit source code for inclusion in the benchmarks.
They examine existing source code.

A commitment to transparency

Because we’re committed to publishing reliable, unbiased benchmarks, we also want make the XPRT development process as transparent as possible. It’s not unusual for people to claim that any given benchmark contains hidden biases. To address this problem, we make our source code available to anyone who joins the community. This approach reduces the risk of unforeseen bias in our benchmarks.

Quality control

Unlike open-source models, open development allows us to control derivative works, which can be important in benchmarking. While open source encourages a constantly evolving product that may fork into substantially different versions, benchmarking requires a product that remains static to enable valid comparisons over time. By controlling derivative works, we can avoid the problem of unauthorized versions of the benchmarks being published as “XPRTs.”

In the future, we may use a traditional open-source model for specific XPRTs or other projects. If we do, we’ll share our reasoning with the community and ask for their thoughts about the best way to proceed. If you’re not a community member, but are interested in benchmark development, we encourage you to join today!

Justin

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT development community, Collaborative benchmark development, Open development, Open Source, What makes a good benchmark? |

New opportunities for TouchXPRT

By Justin Greene

on March 29, 2018

Next week’s XPRT Weekly Tech Spotlight will feature a unique device: the HP Envy x2 2-in-1. The first device of its kind on the market, the Envy x2 runs Windows 10 on ARM hardware—in this case, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 platform. ASUS and Lenovo will release similar devices in the coming months. Using the ARM chips found in many flagship phones, these devices aim to power robust operating systems on 2-in-1s and laptops while providing extended battery life and always-on LTE connections.

These new devices bring ample opportunities for benchmarking. Consumers will want to know about potential trade-offs between price, power, and battery life—incentivizing tech reviewers to dive into the details and provide useful data points. But for the new Windows on ARM systems, the usual benchmarks have presented challenges. Many traditional laptop benchmarks just won’t work on the new systems. TouchXPRT, however, works like a charm.

TouchXPRT assesses performance on any Windows device. Since it’s a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app that runs on both x86 and ARM systems, it can evaluate how well a Windows device running on ARM hardware performs compared to traditional laptops and 2-in-1s. It’s easy to install, takes about 15 minutes to run, and you can download it directly from TouchXPRT.com or install it from the Microsoft Store. Labs can also automate testing using the command line or a script.

If you’ve been looking for a Windows performance evaluation tool that’s easy to use and has the flexibility of a UWP app, give TouchXPRT a try. Read more details about TouchXPRT here, and please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions you may have.

Justin

Posted in Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking, Mobile devices, TouchXPRT, TouchXPRT 2016, TouchXPRT results, Windows 10 |

The XPRTs in action

By Justin Greene

on March 22, 2018

In the near future, we’ll update our “XPRTs around the world” infographic, which provides a snapshot of how people are using the XPRTs worldwide. Among other stats, we include the number of XPRT web mentions, articles, and reviews that have appeared during a given period. Recently, we learned how one of those statistics—a single web site mention of WebXPRT—found its way to consumers in more places than we would have imagined.

Late last month, AnandTech published a performance comparison by Andrei Frumusanu examining the Samsung Galaxy S9’s Snapdragon 845 and Exynos 9810 variants and a number of other high-end phones. WebXPRT was one of the benchmarking tools used. The article stated that both versions of the brand-new S9 were slower than the iPhone X and, in some tests, were slower than even the iPhone 7.

A CNET video discussed the article and the role of WebXPRT in the performance comparison, and the article has been reposted to hundreds of tech media sites around the world. A quick survey shows reposts in Albania, Bulgaria, Denmark, Chile, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, Iran, Italy Japan, Korea, Poland, Russia, Spain, Slovakia, Turkey, and many other countries.

The popularity of the article is not surprising, for it positions the newest flagship phones from the industry’s two largest phone makers in a head-to-head comparison with a somewhat unexpected outcome. AnandTech did nothing to stir controversy or sensationalize the test results, but simply provided readers with an objective, balanced assessment of how these devices compare so that they could draw their own conclusions. The XPRTs share this approach.

We’re grateful to Andrei and others at AnandTech who’ve used the XPRTs over the years to produce content that helps consumers make informed decisions. WebXPRT is just part of AnandTech’s toolkit, but it’s one that’s accessible to anybody free of charge. With the help of BenchmarkXPRT Development Community members, we’ll continue to publish XPRT tools that help users everywhere gain valuable insight into device performance.

Justin

Posted in AnandTech, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Browser-based benchmarks, Collaborative benchmark development, Mobile devices, Performance benchmarking, Performance of computing devices, Phones, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 2015 |

MWC18 and technology on the brink

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 |

Just before showtime

By Justin Greene

on March 1, 2018

In case you missed the announcement, WebXPRT 3 is now live! Please try it out, submit your test results, and feel free to send us your questions or comments.

During the final push toward launch day, it occurred to us that not all of our readers are aware of the steps involved in preparing a benchmark for general availability (GA). Here’s a quick overview of what we did over the last several weeks to prepare for the WebXPRT 3 release, a process that follows the same approach we use for all new XPRTs.

After releasing the community preview (CP), we started on the final build. During this time, we incorporated features that we were not able to include in the CP and fixed a few outstanding issues. Because we always try to make sure that CP results are comparable to eventual GA results, these issues rarely involve the workloads themselves or anything that affects scoring. In the case of WebXPRT 3, the end-of-test results submission form was not fully functional in the CP, so we finished making it ready for prime time.

The period between CP and GA releases is also a time to incorporate any feedback we get from the community during initial testing. One of the benefits of membership in the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community is access to pre-release versions of new benchmarks, along with an opportunity to make your voice heard during the development process.

When the GA candidate build is ready, we begin two types of extensive testing. First, our quality assurance (QA) team performs a thorough review, running the build on numerous devices. In the case of WebXPRT, it also involves testing with multiple browsers. The QA team also keeps a sharp eye out for formatting problems and bugs.

The second type of testing involves comparing the current version of the benchmark with prior versions. We tested WebXPRT 3 on almost 100 devices. While WebXPRT 2015 and WebXPRT 3 scores are not directly comparable, we normalize scores for both sets of results and check that device performance is scaling in the same way. If it isn’t, we need to determine why not.

Finally, after testing is complete and the new build is ready, we finalize all related documentation and tie the various pieces together on the web site. This involves updating the main benchmark page and graphics, the FAQ page, the results tables, and the members’ area.

That’s just a brief summary of what we’ve been up to with WebXPRT in the last few weeks. If you have any questions about the XPRTs or the development community, feel free to ask!

Justin

Posted in Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Browser-based benchmarks, Collaborative benchmark development, Community Preview, Cross-platform benchmarks, WebXPRT, What makes a good benchmark? |

WebXPRT 3 is here!

By Justin Greene

on February 27, 2018

We’re excited to announce that WebXPRT 3 is now available to the public. BenchmarkXPRT Development Community members have been using a community preview for several weeks, but now anyone can run WebXPRT 3 and publish their results.

As we mentioned on the blog, WebXPRT 3 has a completely new UI, updated workloads, and new test content. We carried over several features from WebXPRT 2015 including automation, the option to run individual workloads, and language options for English, German, and Simplified Chinese.

We believe WebXPRT 3 will be as relevant and reliable as WebXPRT 2013 and 2015. After trying it out, please submit your scores and feel free to let us know what you think. We look forward to seeing new results submissions!

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT development community, Browser-based benchmarks, Community Preview, Cross-platform benchmarks, German, Performance benchmarking, Simplified Chinese, Web-based testing, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 3 |

Category: Benchmarking

Comparing open source and open development

Why open development?

A commitment to transparency

Quality control

New opportunities for TouchXPRT

The XPRTs in action

MWC18 and technology on the brink

Just before showtime

WebXPRT 3 is here!

Check out the other XPRTs: