Category: Benchmarking

Meeting the old fashioned way

on August 30, 2012

As Bill discussed last week, we work in many different ways to build the community. Facebook, Webinars, Twitter, this blog—all of these social media venues help connect those of us in the community.

Sometimes, though, it’s nice to sit down in person and chat.

Which is precisely what I’m inviting fellow community members to do at the upcoming Intel Developer Forum (IDF). IDF runs from September 11 to 13 at the Moscone West Convention Center in San Francisco. While I’ll be busy attending the show for part of each day, I’d love to spend some of my free time talking with people about both HDXPRT and TouchXPRT. We could do it informally, by simply running across each other on the show floor, or we could schedule some meetings.

We could even make a group lunch of it. If a few folks can agree on a day and time, I’d be happy to set up and host a lunch at a nearby restaurant so we can share ideas while enjoying a meal.

If you’re interested, feel free to email me, and we’ll arrange to get together. I hope to have many good conversations with community members at the show!

Mark Van Name

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Posted in Benchmarking, Collaborative benchmark development, Let us know your thoughts |

Growing the community

By Bill Catchings

on August 23, 2012

Growing the community

It’s probably stating the obvious to say that what makes the XPRT Development Community work is the people. The more people there are in the community, the better the resulting benchmarks will be. Naturally, that means we want more people in the community.

Part of PT’s role in building the community is to get more people involved. Over the last couple of years, that has meant doing a number of different things—from conducting Webinars (we’ll have the next one in September) to meeting at trade shows (we expect to be at CES again next year) to contacting individuals in person and via email to using social media like Twitter (follow us at @HDXPRT) and Facebook (like HDXPRT Development Community). As I mentioned last week, we are now working on some videos to help get out the message. Basically, we’ve been telling everyone we can about the benchmarks and the community that creates them.

One thing we haven’t done, however, is to actively enlist the community itself in building the community. Here are some ways you can help. Please like, follow, or whatever us on the different social media platforms. Invite others to join the community. Probably most importantly, use the benchmarks and publish the results. Now that HDXPRT 2012 is out, we want to see its results popping up in as many places as possible.

You can also help by telling us your ideas for how to grow the community. What else do you think we should be doing?

Bill

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Posted in Collaborative benchmark development, HDXPRT 2012 |

Lights! Camera! Action!

By Bill Catchings

on August 10, 2012

While we continue working on the testing, white papers, and Webinars that are part of the HDXPRT 2012 roll-out, we also are working on some other things as well. The importance of HDXPRT shows how the world is moving toward a much more visual/graphical future. To keep up with that trend and with our benchmark, we are adding video content to the site.

At Principled Technologies, we have been embracing video in a big way. We built a dedicated video-production studio (picture lots of green walls) and bought the necessary video, audio, and lighting gear, so our talented video-production staffers have all the tools they need. Our goal is to be able to quickly create for our clients all sorts of videos of things like our performance reports. We are now able to utilize those same video assets for the XPRTs (HDXPRT and TouchXPRT).

To get things rolling here, we created a video blog based on an entry from a few weeks ago. We will be experimenting with doing more with video, including videos explaining and promoting HDXPRT and regular video blogs. Let us know what you would like to see!

Bill

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Posted in Collaborative benchmark development, HDXPRT, TouchXPRT |

History in the making

By Bill Catchings

on July 13, 2012

We are quickly approaching the debut of HDXPRT 2012. It will be the second version of HDXPRT developed under the benchmark development community paradigm. This milestone provides a nice opportunity to look back at what has happened over the nearly two years since we started creating community-based benchmarks.

The most obvious accomplishment is the development of HDXPRT 2011 and HDXPRT 2012. HDXPRT 2011 has been used around the world for evaluating the performance of computers using applications doing activities that consumers do to create and consume content. We are hopeful that HDXPRT 2012 will be even more widely used.

We also announced earlier this year a new benchmark, TouchXPRT. This benchmark will provide a way to evaluate the performance of the emerging touch-based devices, including tablets. TouchXPRT will debut later this year, initially on Windows 8 Metro.

We have been working hard to get the word out about the benchmarks. We’ve been writing this weekly blog, conducting Webinars, and generally talking with folks in the computer industry. We’ve visited with members of the community around the world at trade shows like CES in Las Vegas and Computex in Taipei. We also spent time with members of the press and computer hardware and software developers. Over the coming months, we are planning to revamp the Web site, add video content, and generally find ways to better engage with and extend the development community.

Less obvious, but equally important to me, has been the development of the development community itself. Developing benchmarks has not been done this way before. We are doing what we can to make the process open to the community, including releasing the benchmark source code. We are optimistic that this method will grow and be a real asset for the industry.

As we look at the growing family of benchmarks under the benchmark XPRT umbrella, the question is always what is next? How can we improve the products and the community? What performance areas do we need to look at in the future? Battery life? Macs? Phones?

Thanks so much for joining us on this journey. The members of this community are what make it work. We look forward to continuing the journey with you!

Bill

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Posted in Application-based benchmarks, Collaborative benchmark development, HDXPRT, HDXPRT 2012, History of benchmarking, TouchXPRT |

Counting down

By Eric Hale

on July 6, 2012

We’ve been hard at work since the end of the beta period, driving toward the release of HDXPRT 2012. Things are looking good. The RTM is coming soon, so we thought we’d share the next few milestones with you.

RTM candidate: 7/13/12. At this point, we stop development. There are no feature changes after this point.
HDXPRT 2012 launch: 7/27/12. Having tested the RTM and manufactured the DVDs, we mail the benchmark to the community members. This is when the press release goes out. It’s also when we publish the HDXPRT 2012 white paper. Unlike the design document, this paper will explain HDXPRT 2012 to the general public.
Webinar: 8/3/28 – We talk about HDXPRT 2012 and take your questions.
First scaling paper: 8/31/12. As with HDXPRT 2011, we will be publishing a set of scaling studies. The first will test several modern desktop processors, looking at factors such as varying the amount of RAM, comparing HDDs to SSDs, and comparing internal graphics to a couple of popular graphics cards.
Second scaling paper: 9/28/12. In this paper, we expand on the testing we did in the first scaling paper.

We will release an update of HDXPRT 2012 that supports Windows 8 and includes bug fixes within a month of Windows 8 launch.

We’re very excited about the release of HDXPRT 2012, and look forward to seeing what you do with it!

Eric

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Posted in Application-based benchmarks, Collaborative benchmark development, HDXPRT, HDXPRT 2012, HDXPRT 2012 beta, HDXPRT development process, HDXPRT release cycle |

Tablets everywhere

By Bill Catchings

on June 29, 2012

Everyone wants in on the tablet market. This month, two software vendors have announced hardware tablets—Microsoft’s Surface and Google’s Nexus 7. Both vendors in the past relied on OEMs to create tablets using their software (Windows and Android). Both have met with limited success doing so.

Now, both are trying Apple’s strategy of controlling the hardware as well the software. Unlike Apple, however, Microsoft and Google still need to work with their OEM partners. I’m looking forward to watching that delicate dance!

I’m looking forward more, however, to being able to actually play with both of those products. I’m also looking forward to using TouchXPRT on such products. We have not given you an update in a while on TouchXPRT, but rest assured that we are hard at work on it. Once we have HDXPRT 2012 ready to go, we will give you more details on where we are with TouchXPRT and its current schedule. The touch and tablet market are heating up and we plan to be there for it. As we have indicated before, we will support Windows 8 Metro in the first version, but we see a real need for TouchXPRT to work on multiple platforms. So much to do!

Please note that today is the end of the beta test period. We appreciate the results, bugs, and suggestions you have sent so far. Feel free, however, to continue to send us any feedback or issues you find even after the official beta period is complete. After today, we can’t guarantee to be able to address them, but we will try.

Bill

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Posted in Performance testing on tablets, Touch-based benchmarking, Touch-based computing, Touch-based devices, TouchXPRT |

Category: Benchmarking

Meeting the old fashioned way

Growing the community

Lights! Camera! Action!

History in the making

Counting down

Tablets everywhere

Check out the other XPRTs: