Category: Benchmarking

The HDXPRT 2013 RFC is here

on February 14, 2013

We released the RFC, or request for comments, for HDXPRT 2013 yesterday. Our major objective with the RFC is to get your feedback. Your feedback played an important part in developing HDXPRT 2012, and we are hoping it plays an even larger role in developing HDXPRT 2013.

The RFC includes our thoughts and ideas for the design of HDXPRT 2013 based on the many conversations we’ve had over the six months since the current version of HDXPRT debuted. Indeed, during the last few weeks, we shared some of the feedback we received during and after the Webinar in January.

At this point, nothing is written in stone. Now is the time to let us know where you agree and where you disagree. For example, the current proposal drops support for Windows 7. Do you have an opinion about this? Let us know.

The RFC is available for Development Community members at http://www.principledtechnologies.com/hdxprt/forum/hdxprt2013RFC.php. Our goal is to get your feedback by March 6. We’d like as much of the feedback as possible to appear on the forums to help stimulate discussion. However, if you prefer to send in your comments via email, please send them to BenchmarkXPRTsupport@hdxprt.com.

Of course, you can send comments to us any time, and you don’t have to limit yourself to HDXPRT! Do you have thoughts about TouchXPRT or WebXPRT? They are both moving rapidly toward their official releases. Do you have thoughts about other benchmarks we should consider developing? Send those, too!

Eric

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Posted in Collaborative benchmark development, HDXPRT 2013, HDXPRT 2013 RFC, HDXPRT Development Community benefits, HDXPRT development process |

Straight from the source

By Eric Hale

on February 7, 2013

One of the pillars of our community model of benchmark development is making the source available. As we’ve said many times, we believe that doing so leads to better benchmarks.

Today we released the source for HDXPRT 2012. As with previous versions of HDXPRT, the source is available only to community members, not to the general public. We apologize that it has taken so long. HDXPRT is complicated to build, and we wanted to have a simpler and more robust build process before we made the source available.

The source allows you to examine how HDXPRT is implemented and to try some experiments of your own. Because of the size of HDXPRT 2012, the source package does not include the applications or the data files for the workloads. By including only the benchmark source code and associated files, we could keep the package small enough to download. If you want to try some changes for experiments and test them, all you need to do is install HDXPRT 2012 from the distribution DVDs. The compilation instructions will tell you how to copy your modified executables over the shipping versions.

Community members can get instructions on how to download the source code here (registration required).

If you create something interesting while you’re experimenting, let us know! We’d love to have the community consider it for HDXPRT 2013.

Speaking of the community, we’ve sent T-shirts to all community members who’ve supplied their up-to-date mailing address. If you’re a community member who wants a shirt but hasn’t yet let us know, please e-mail benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechnologies.com with your mailing address by February 15th.

Eric

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Posted in Collaborative benchmark development, HDXPRT, HDXPRT Development Community benefits, HDXPRT source code |

Keep them coming!

By Eric Hale

on January 31, 2013

Questions and comments have continued to come in since the Webinar last week. Here are a few of them:

How long are results valid? For a reviewer like us, we need to know that we can reuse results for a reasonable length of time. There is a tension between keeping results stable and keeping the benchmark current enough for the results to be relevant. Historically, HDXPRT allowed at least a year between releases. Based on the feedback we’ve received, a year seems like a reasonable length of time.
Is HDXPRT command line operable? (asked by a community member with a scripted suite of tests) HDXPRT 2012 is not, but we will consider adding a command line interface for HDXPRT 2013. While most casual users don’t need a command line interface, it could be very valuable to those of us using HDXPRT in labs.
I would be hesitant to overemphasize the running time of HDXPRT. The more applications it runs, the more it can differentiate things and the more interesting it is to those of us who run it at a professional level. If I could say “This gives a complete overview of the performance of this system,” that would actually save time. This comment was a surprise, given the amount of feedback we received saying that HDXPRT was too large. However, this gets to the heart of why we all need to be careful as we consider which applications to include in HDXPRT 2013.

If you had to miss the Webinar, it’s available at the BenchmarkXPRT 2013 Webinars page.

We’re planning to release the HDXPRT 2013 RFC next week. We’re looking forward to your comments.

Eric

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Posted in Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking, HDXPRT, HDXPRT workloads |

Some good questions

By Eric Hale

on January 24, 2013

On Tuesday, we had a Webinar for the BenchmarkXPRT community. This Webinar covered the material that Bill would have given in individual presentations at CES. As such, it was an overview of the XPRT family.

The Webinar was well attended. We will be posting the slides and the recording of the Webinar online soon. However, we got some good questions, and thought we’d share our responses with you.

How will updates to TouchXPRT, and other benchmarks, affect results? We will avoid affecting results as much as possible. However, when updates do affect results, we will disclose the effect and the testing we performed to verify it.

Will we provide a way for benchmark users to talk to each other about support issues, perhaps via OpenBlog? We had envisioned the benchmark forums providing this opportunity. However, we are very happy to look into ways to make community communication easier and more effective.

Do you provide company memberships, as opposed to individual memberships? Not currently, although we will certainly look into this. We have no formal voting mechanism, as SPEC and some other organizations have. We may get there one day, but it’s not currently an issue. If your concern is about paying multiple membership fees, contact us, and we’ll work with you to avoid that.

In HDXPRT, can you select the CPU or GPU for video conversion and control the quality of the conversion? We have not investigated this. HDXPRT installs the applications using the default settings. However, because HDXPRT installs the applications in a separate step from running the test, it might be possible to manually change the benchmark settings and then run HDXPRT. We will be looking into this and reporting on it going forward.

How does the server influence WebXPRT results? We have run WebXPRT hosted on different servers in different locations, and seen little influence on the results. However, as part of preparing the WebXPRT general release, we will characterize and document the influence of the server.

Feel free to let us know what you think about these or any other topics. As I said earlier, we’ll be posting the whole Webinar online soon.

Eric

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Posted in Benchmarking, Benchmarks in general, CES, HDXPRT, TouchXPRT, WebXPRT |

Ending the year with a bang!

By Eric Hale

on January 2, 2013

As we promised in the blog post The newest member of the family, we made the WebXPRT 2013 community preview available this week. It has already been used in a review! The AnandTech review of the Acer Iconia W510 includes results from the WebXPRT 2013 community preview for that device and for the Microsoft Surface RT and the Apple iPad 4. The review has results from the TouchXPRT 2013 community preview for the Acer Iconia W510, Microsoft Surface RT, and the ASUS VivoTab RT as well.

Obviously, we’ve been doing some testing ourselves. Here’s a sampling of the devices on which we’ve successfully run WebXPRT:

Device	Processor	Operating system	Browser	Score	Confidence interval
HP Envy 2	1.8 GHz Intel Atom Z2760	Windows 8	Internet Explorer 10.0.92	201	+/- 6
Asus VivoTab RT	1.2 GHz Tegra 3 T30L	Windows RT	Internet Explorer 10.0.92	160	+/- 5
Kindle Fire	1.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A9	Android OS 2.3 (customized: 6.3.1_user_4107720)	Safari 5	92	+/- 2
ASUS-made Google Nexus 7	1.2 GHz Tegra 3 T30L	Android 4.2	Chrome 18	201	+/- 4
Motorola DroidX phone	1 GHz TI OMAP3630-1000	Android 4.5.621	Browser version 2.3.4	26	+/- 1
iPhone 5	1.3 GHz Apple A6	iOS 6.0.2	Safari 6	168	+/- 2
iPad mini	1GHz Apple A5	iOS 6.0.2	Safari 6	110	+/- 1
iPad 4	1.4 GHz Apple A6X	iOS 6.0.1	Safari 6	180	+/- 2

As the results above show, WebXPRT can run on a wide range of devices. We are working to get results on lots of different devices and would like your help. We’ll set up a forum thread for results that starts with these. We’ll then add additional ones we produce. Please respond in the thread with results you get.

In addition to performance results, the WebXPRT 2013 community preview also provides a report on the HTML 5 capabilities of your device. For those who want to know more about the capabilities of HTML 5, there’s more good news. The W3C community released the feature-complete spec for HTML 5 and Canvas 2D this week.

You can find an explanation of scenarios in the WebXPRT 2013 community preview, and an explanation of how it calculates its results in the WebXPRT 2013 CP1 Overview. Let us know what you think. There’s still time to help us shape the final version of both WebXPRT 2013 and TouchXPRT 2013.

Eric

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Posted in Benchmarking, HTML5, Let us know your thoughts, Performance testing on tablets, TouchXPRT, Web-based testing, WebXPRT |

There is such a thing as too much

By Eric Hale

on December 6, 2012

There’s been a lot of excitement about TouchXPRT recently. However, we haven’t been ignoring HDXPRT. On November 9, we released a patch that lets HDXPRT support Windows 8. We’ve now integrated the patch into HDXPRT2012, so all copies of HDXPRT 2012 going forward will install on Windows 8 without the need for a separate step.

As promised, we will be releasing the source code for HDXPRT 2012. We anticipate having it available for community members by December 14.

During the comment period for HDXPRT, this message came through loud and clear: HDXPRT 2012 is too big and takes too long to run. So we are working hard to find the best way to reduce the number of applications and scenarios. While we want to make the benchmark smaller and faster, we want to make sure that HDXPRT 2013 is comprehensive enough to provide useful performance metrics for the greatest number of people.

We’re working toward having an RFC in late January that will define a leaner, meaner HDXPRT 2013, and will reflect the other comments we have as received as well. If you have thoughts about which applications and scenarios are most important to you, please let us know.

In other news, CES is coming in January, and Principled Technologies will be there! Once again, Bill is hoping to meet with as many of you in the Development Community as possible. We’ll have a suite at the Hilton and would love for you to come, kick back, and talk about HDXPRT, TouchXPRT, the future of benchmarks, or about the cool things you’ve seen at the show. (Bill loves talking about gadgets. Last year, he went into gadget overload!)

If you plan to be at CES, but are stuck working a booth or suite, let us know and Bill will try to stop by and say hi. Drop us an email at hdxrpt_CES@principledtechnologies.com and we will set up an appointment.

Finally, we’re really excited about the big changes at the Principled Technologies Web site. The new Web site gives us a lot of opportunities. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be looking at ways the Development Community can take advantage of them.

Eric

on this post in the forums

Posted in Application-based benchmarks, Benchmarking, CES, Collaborative benchmark development, HDXPRT 2013, HDXPRT Development Community benefits, Principled Technologies, What makes a good benchmark?, Windows 8 | Tagged CES |

Category: Benchmarking

The HDXPRT 2013 RFC is here

Straight from the source

Keep them coming!

Some good questions

Ending the year with a bang!

There is such a thing as too much

Check out the other XPRTs: