Category: Benchmarking

Getting the most from the XPRTs

on October 30, 2014

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

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Posted in Android, Battery life, BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT |

CrXPRT is here!

By Eric Hale

on October 15, 2014

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

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Posted in Battery life, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Chrome OS, Community Preview, CrXPRT, Performance benchmarking |

News from the factory floor

By Eric Hale

on October 9, 2014

As we mentioned last week, we have BatteryXPRT and MobileXPRT news:

Today, we’re releasing a new build of MobileXPRT 2013 at MobileXPRT.com and the Google Play store. This build addresses issues we saw when testing MobileXPRT on the beta build of Android L and the experimental ART runtime. The tests have not changed, and the scores are comparable with previous MobileXPRT 2013 scores.

Also, the BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android APKs are now available at BatteryXPRT.com. Up to now, only the full installer, including the content for the tests, was available on our Web site. The APKs are much smaller and allow you to download the test content during installation. For users who have trouble accessing the Google Play store, these APKs may make it easier to download the benchmark.

If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us at BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

Don’t forget: we’re releasing the community preview of CrXPRT next week!

Eric

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Posted in Android, BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Chrome OS, Community Preview, CrXPRT, MobileXPRT |

Activity all around

By Justin Greene

on October 2, 2014

It’s a busy time in XPRT land, and we wanted to share some news about upcoming events.

The first bit is an update about the CrXPRT 2014 Community Preview. We’ve been busy refining the benchmark, and feel like the current candidate build under test is likely to ship as our Community Preview. We’ll publish more details about the app and its workloads soon, but don’t be surprised to see a Community Preview announcement in the near future.

In Patching and future proofing, we discussed two potential problems while running MobileXPRT 2013 on some versions of Android 4.4 and the developer’s preview of Android L. The first problem involves the benchmark not showing scores when running on a Nexus 5 with the ART runtime enabled. The second problem was a failure of the Create Slideshow workload on Android L. In order to address the underlying cause of both problems, we’ll soon be issuing a patched MobileXPRT 2013 build. We’re still wrapping up our testing, but expect to release the patch at some point next week.

We’ll also be posting BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android APKs directly on the BatteryXPRT.com site. For users who have low bandwidth or trouble accessing the Google Play store, these APKs will make it easier to download the benchmark.

If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us at BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

Justin

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Posted in Android, BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, Community Preview, CrXPRT, MobileXPRT |

What do you think when you hear “Chromebook”?

By Justin Greene

on September 11, 2014

We’ve been thinking a lot about Chromebooks while doing all of our testing in preparation for the CrXPRT Community Preview. In both the models we’re testing and the ones announced in the press, we’ve seen just how much the Chromebook market is changing. Some folks even claim that Chromebook sales made up 35 percent of US commercial laptop sales in the first half of 2014. What’s even more interesting to us is the wide variety of Chromebooks on the market.

Choosing between Chromebooks these days is becoming more complicated than it used to be. There’s a greater range of hardware choices, and those choices can have a direct impact on performance and battery life. Some Chromebooks offer local storage up to 320 GB, touch screens, and 4G/LTE connectivity. Prices range widely, from $199 to $1,499. Even seemingly comparable systems can perform much differently when put to the test. For instance, we recently tested two Chromebooks separated by only $50 in price, but over 5 hours of estimated battery life!

Whether a consumer’s ultimate purchasing decision is based on price, specs, or a combination of factors, there are few things more valuable to buyers than reliable facts about performance and battery life. Benchmarking is ultimately about gaining useful data for decision making, and that’s why we’re excited about the value that CrXPRT will bring to the Chromebook discussion!

Justin

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Posted in Chrome OS, CrXPRT, Google Chrome, Performance of computing devices, What makes a good benchmark? |

Time to get creative

By Justin Greene

on September 4, 2014

The CrXPRT Community Preview is right around the corner, and there’s no sign of things slowing down. We’re exploring new opportunities on a number of fronts, and we’d love to hear what you think! We’re considering possible changes to WebXPRT and MobileXPRT, and since the mobile device market is changing all the time, we’re looking for the next great benchmark opportunity. In both cases, the development community is a rich source of ideas, so we’d like to tap into it one more time.

A while back, we added a new Web form in the members’ area for submitting benchmark ideas. Some of the ideas we have so far include:

A benchmark to evaluate camera features and photo quality on phones and tablets
A benchmark for measuring the performance of cloud services
A benchmark for measuring the performance and battery life of iOS-based devices

So, what would you like to see? Any of these, or do you have ideas we haven’t mentioned? Also, we’d love to hear your feedback on ways we can improve, both with the XPRTs themselves and with community life. Either way, send a message to BenchmarkXPRTSupport@principledtechnologies.com and let us know what you think!

Justin

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Posted in BenchmarkXPRT development community, Collaborative benchmark development, Community Preview, CrXPRT, MobileXPRT, WebXPRT, What makes a good benchmark? |

Category: Benchmarking

Getting the most from the XPRTs

CrXPRT is here!

News from the factory floor

Activity all around

What do you think when you hear “Chromebook”?

Time to get creative

Check out the other XPRTs: