Category: Benchmarking

Explaining the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community

on August 6, 2015

Over the last year, I’ve spoken about the XPRT benchmarks with people across America, in China (at IDF Shenzhen), and in Europe (at Mobile World Congress). I regularly found myself having to explain how the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community works. While I was glad to do so, I found myself wishing that the many people I wasn’t able to talk with could also learn about how the community works.

To help make that happen, we’ve developed a simple and engaging video. My (admittedly prejudiced) opinion is that it does a great job of explaining how the community works in less than two minutes. That’s a lot faster than I was able to explain it to folks!

We hope you enjoy the video. And we hope you’ll pass it along to other folks who aren’t already part of the community so they can learn how it works and hopefully be persuaded to join us. Thanks!

Bill

Posted in Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Collaborative benchmark development, IDF, What makes a good benchmark? |

What’s in a name?

By Eric Hale

on July 30, 2015

A couple of weeks ago, the Notebookcheck German site published a review of the Huawei P8lite. We were pleased to see they used WebXPRT 2015, and the P8 Lite got an overall score of 47. This week, AnandTech published their review of the Huawei P8lite. In their review, the P8lite got an overall score of 59!

Those scores are very different, but it was not difficult to figure out why. The P8lite comes in two versions, depending on your market. The version Notebookcheck used is based on HiSilicon’s Kirin 620, while the version AnandTech used was Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 615 SoC. It’s also worth noting that the phone Notebookcheck tested was running Android 5.0, while the phone AnandTech tested was running Android 4.4. With different hardware and different operating systems, it’s no surprise that the results were different.

One consequence of the XPRTs being used across the world is that is that it is not uncommon to see results from devices in different markets. As we’ve said before, many things can influence benchmark results, so don’t assume that two devices with the same name are identical.

Kudos to both AnandTech and Notebookcheck for their care in presenting the system information for the devices in their reviews. The AnandTech review even included a brief description of the two models of the P8lite. This type of information is essential for helping people make informed decisions.

In other news, Windows 10 launched yesterday. We’re looking forward to seeing the TouchXPRT and WebXPRT results!

Eric

Posted in Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking computing devices, WebXPRT 2015, Windows 10 |

An update on MobileXPRT 2015

By Eric Hale

on July 23, 2015

As I mentioned last week, we’ve been testing MobileXPRT 2015.

We’ve rebuilt the current MobileXPRT as a 64-bit application. This means that MobileXPRT 2015 will only run on Android 5.0 and above. For this reason, we’ll make MobileXPRT 2013 available for testing older versions of the operating system. Because the workloads haven’t changed, you’ll be able to compare results from MobileXPRT 2013 to those from MobileXPRT 2015.

Another change to MobileXPRT 2015 will be the removal of the UX tests. While these tests were useful on lower-end devices when MobileXPRT 2013 came out, they don’t distinguish modern devices. However, should you need them, these tests will continue to be available as part of MobileXPRT 2013.

There are a few other features that we’ll be talking about over the next few weeks. We’ll be releasing the MobileXPRT 2015 community preview before Android M is released. We’re looking forward to see how Android M performs!

Eric

Posted in Android, Android L, Android M, Collaborative benchmark development, Community Preview, MobileXPRT 2015 |

Mystery solved

By Eric Hale

on July 2, 2015

As we mentioned a few weeks ago, the WebXPRT Local Notes test would not complete on recent builds of Windows 10 when using the Edge browser. Other browsers complete WebXPRT in recent Windows 10 builds without any problems.

We now know what is causing this behavior. The Local Notes test stores encrypted content in LocalStorage as UTF-16 character encoded Unicode strings. The encrypted content included values that are not considered valid characters in certain use cases. The current Edge implementation treats these characters as undefined and cannot store them. Other browsers may not have had an issue with the characters because of differences in the way they implement LocalStorage.

We’ve been able to work around this by using escape sequences for unsupported Unicode code points. Testing so far has not shown any perceptible change in results, so we believe that we will able to make this change to WebXPRT without compromising the comparability of the results.

Because this issue affects both WebXPRT 2013 and WebXPRT 2015, we’re planning to update both versions. We’ll let you know as soon as they are available.

If you’d like more details about this issue and the fix, please let us know.

Eric

Posted in Performance benchmarking, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 2015, What makes a good benchmark?, Windows 10 |

Something old, something new

By Eric Hale

on June 25, 2015

Last week, we talked about porting TouchXPRT 2014 to be a Windows 10 universal app. This will let it run on devices running Windows 10 and those running Windows 10 mobile.

We won’t be retiring TouchXPRT 2014 when we release the Windows 10 universal app version. Windows 8 doesn’t support Windows 10 universal apps, but Windows 10 will be able to run Windows 8 applications. This means you’ll also be continue to be able to use TouchXPRT 2014 to test Windows 8 based systems, as well as to compare Windows 8 and Windows 10 performance.

The results from TouchXPRT 2014 and the universal app version of the benchmark won’t be compatible. Even though the test scenarios will be the same, the porting process means that we have to change the APIs the benchmark is using and rebuild the benchmark with different tools.

We’re currently debating changing the way we version the benchmarks. As the number of versions of each benchmark increases, it may make sense to move away from year-based versioning. This will obviously affect what we call the new Windows 10 version of TouchXPRT. If you have any thoughts on this, please let us know!

Eric

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT development community, Collaborative benchmark development, Future of performance evaluation, TouchXPRT, TouchXPRT 2014, TouchXPRT release cycle, Windows 10, Windows 8 |

Hoping for a perfect 10

By Eric Hale

on June 18, 2015

As many of you know by now, the release date for Windows 10 is July 29. As we’ve said before, we are hard at work getting TouchXPRT ready for Windows 10. We’ve succeeded in building TouchXPRT as a universal app, and it’s now running on Windows 10. We haven’t successfully run it on Windows 10 Phone yet, but we’re working on that.

Unfortunately, I can’t share any performance data. The EULA for the current build of Windows 10 (build 10143 as I’m writing this) forbids publishing benchmark results without prior written approval from Microsoft.

We’ll continue testing and refining the porting of TouchXPRT to Windows 10. Our goal is to release it as a universal app to the community in July.

What are your experiences testing Windows 10? We’d love to hear about them!

Eric

Posted in Performance benchmarking, TouchXPRT, TouchXPRT development process, TouchXPRT release cycle, Windows 10 |

Category: Benchmarking

Explaining the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community

What’s in a name?

An update on MobileXPRT 2015

Mystery solved

Something old, something new

Hoping for a perfect 10

Check out the other XPRTs: