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Category: Benchmarking

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

A first look

The beta build of WebXPRT 2015 is complete. Although the benchmark is still under development, it looks great!

As we described in the design document, it includes a number of improvements over WebXPRT 2013. There are more, and more demanding, tests. The UI has a cleaner, more modern look, and includes a couple of improvements people have been asking for. There is now descriptive text so that you know what’s happening during the test. Also, a progress indicator in the upper right corner shows you how close the test is to completion. Although the screens aren’t final, here’s a preview of one of the new DNA Sequence Analysis test screens:

WebXPRT DNA

One of the great virtues of WebXPRT is that it runs on almost anything. However, that level of compatibility has limited the range of devices WebXPRT can test. WebXPRT 2015 introduces a set of experimental tests. Running these tests is optional and their results are not included in the Overall Score. We hope that folks will use them to evaluate both new technologies and platform-specific technologies. The first Community Preview will include a WebGL-based 3D experimental test. We expect to add new experimental tests over time and we’re hoping community members will contribute tests or ideas for them.

I’m very excited to see the new WebXPRT. We’re testing now, and I hope to be able to let you know when the Community Preview will be available soon.

Eric

More than Chromebooks

Recently, we got a question from AnandTech asking how hard it would be to get CrXPRT to run on Chrome on Windows.

The short answer is that getting it to run isn’t difficult. However, as we have written about many times in the past, it’s not enough for a benchmark to simply run on a device. The results it produces must be comparable. Even if the benchmark appears to run identically, small differences in timers or how the platform reports its state can have a big impact.

To date, we have been dealing only with Chromebooks of various flavors. However, we’re now testing CrXPRT on a much wider range of devices. The results are generally looking reasonable, although we’re finding some minor issues. For example, the battery information isn’t as granular on some devices as it is on Chromebooks.

As soon as we are sure that CrXPRT is returning reasonable results on the new classes of devices, you’ll be the first to know!

In other news, we’re planning to remove TouchXPRT 2013 from the Windows Store on February 16. We wanted to have a period of overlap with TouchXPRT 2014 to allow labs time to transition. It’s been over 6 months, and we feel this is a good time. TouchXPRT 2013 will remain available in the members’ area of the BenchmarkXPRT.com Web site.

Eric

So easy a child can do it!

Tomorrow we are releasing a new video featuring CrXPRT. This one is set in a school science fair, where “Ellie Smith” explains how she used CrXPRT to help her school decide which Chromebook to buy. We were lucky enough to get a thoroughly professional and charming young actress to play the role of Ellie. (I have a tiny cameo as the guy in the gray sport coat at the back of the room.)

Before we started shooting the video, we asked an actual 10-year-old to install and run CrXPRT. I hate to sound like an old commercial, but it really was so simple that a child could do it!

We also created a faux science report to go with the video. An adult—not a sixth-grader—wrote the report, but the results in it and in the video are real. (You can follow the links in the science report to see the real-world results online.)

When it goes live, you’ll find the video and the report on CrXPRT.com, as well as on YouTube and SlideShare. We hope you’ll enjoy seeing Ellie’s project!

Eric

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CrXPRT 2015 is here!

Today, we’re releasing CrXPRT 2015, our benchmark for evaluating the performance and battery life of Chrome OS devices. The BenchmarkXPRT Development Community has been using community previews for several weeks, but now that we’ve released the benchmark, anyone can download CrXPRT and publish results.

Download CrXPRT 2015 from the Chrome Web Store

You can read more about CrXPRT in the CrXPRT 2015 User Manual located here. The User Manual also explains how to configure your device for testing and discusses the options that are available to you.

After trying out CrXPRT, please send your comments to BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

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Timing is everything

We have a couple instances of interesting timing this week.

A few weeks ago, we released the second community preview for CrXPRT (CP2).  It’s been doing very well and we’re planning to release CrXPRT to the public next week. Many thanks to all the community members who have helped make this possible.

Because the release is so close to the end of the year, the general release will be CrXPRT 2015. However, the community previews were dated 2014, which is potentially confusing. We want to reassure you that the results will still be comparable. As we discussed last week, for any of the XPRT benchmarks, the results from the community previews are always comparable to those from the final release.

In other news, we fixed the intermittent problem BatteryXPRT was having on the Nexus 9. The tests are looking good. In a bit of really good timing, this week Google started rolling out Android 5.01. We will be going back and retesting the devices with the newer version of the OS. We don’t expect any new problems, but it’s very nice that we got to check it out before we released the patch.

Eric

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