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Category: Performance benchmarking

The XPRTs can help with your back-to-school shopping

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on August 4, 2022

The new school year is upon us, and learners of all ages are looking for tech devices that have the capabilities they will need in the coming year. The tech marketplace can be confusing, and competing claims can be hard to navigate. The XPRTs are here to help! Whether you’re shopping for a new phone, tablet, Chromebook, laptop, or desktop, the XPRTs can provide reliable, industry-trusted performance scores that can cut through all the noise.

A good place to start looking for scores is the WebXPRT 4 results viewer. The viewer displays WebXPRT 4 scores from over 175 devices—including many hot new releases—and we’re adding new scores all the time. To learn more about the viewer’s capabilities and how you can use it to compare devices, check out this blog post.

Another resource we offer is the XPRT results browser. The browser is the most efficient way to access the XPRT results database, which currently holds more than 3,000 test results from over 120 sources, including major tech review publications around the world, OEMs, and independent testers. It offers a wealth of current and historical performance data across all of the XPRT benchmarks and hundreds of devices. You can read more about how to use the results browser here.

Also, if you’re considering a popular device, chances are good that a recent tech review includes an XPRT score for that device. Two quick ways to find these reviews: (1) go to your favorite tech review site and search for “XPRT” and (2) go to a search engine and enter the device name and XPRT name (e.g., “Apple MacBook Air” and “WebXPRT”). Here are a few recent tech reviews that use one of the XPRTs to evaluate a popular device:

The XPRTs can help consumers make better-informed and more confident tech purchases. As this school year begins, we hope you’ll find the data you need on our site or in an XPRT-related tech review. If you have any questions about the XPRTs, XPRT scores, or the results database please feel free to ask!

Justin

Posted in Apple, benchmark, Benchmark metrics, Browser-based benchmarks, Chromebooks, CrXPRT, Education, Laptops, Mobile devices, Performance benchmarking, Phones, results, Tablets, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 3, WebXPRT 4 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , |

We’ve moved WebXPRT Singapore to a new hosting environment

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on July 28, 2022

When we first released WebXPRT 2013, some users in mainland China reported slow download times when running the benchmark. In response, we set up a mirror host site in Singapore to facilitate WebXPRT testing in China and other East Asian countries. We continued this practice with subsequent WebXPRT versions, and currently offer Singapore-based instances of WebXPRT 4, WebXPRT 3, and WebXPRT 2015.

Until this past month, we used an Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2-Classic environment to host the Singapore mirror site. Because Amazon retired the EC2-Classic environment, we had to migrate each of the WebXPRT Singapore instances to a new AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environment.  

We do not expect the new environment to affect WebXPRT Singapore testing or results, and have not yet observed any significant differences in WebXPRT performance scores while testing on the new site. If you have a different experience when testing on the new site or encounter interruptions when trying to access the test, please let us know!

Justin

Posted in Amazon Web Services, benchmark, Benchmarking, Browser-based benchmarks, Performance benchmarking, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 2013, WebXPRT 2015, WebXPRT 3, WebXPRT 4 |

WebXPRT passes the million-run milestone!

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on July 21, 2022

We’re excited to see that users have successfully completed over 1,000,000 WebXPRT runs! If you’ve run WebXPRT in any of the 924 cities and 81 countries from which we’ve received complete test data—including newcomers Bahrain, Bangladesh, Mauritius, The Philippines, and South Korea —we’re grateful for your help. We could not have reached this milestone without you!

As the chart below illustrates, WebXPRT use has grown steadily since the debut of WebXPRT 2013. On average, we now record more WebXPRT runs in one month than we recorded in the entirety of our first year. With over 104,000 runs so far in 2022, that growth is continuing.

For us, this moment represents more than a numerical milestone. Developing and maintaining a benchmark is never easy, and a cross-platform benchmark that will run on a wide variety of devices poses an additional set of challenges. For such a benchmark to succeed, developers need not only technical competency, but the trust and support of the benchmarking community. WebXPRT is now in its ninth year, and its consistent year-over-year growth tells us that the benchmark continues to hold value for manufacturers, OEM labs, the tech press, and end users like you. We see it as a sign of trust that folks repeatedly return to the benchmark for reliable performance metrics. We’re grateful for that trust, and for everyone that’s contributed to the WebXPRT development process throughout the years.

We’ll have more to share related to this exciting milestone in the weeks to come, so stay tuned to the blog. If you have any questions or comments about WebXPRT, we’d love to hear from you!

Justin

Posted in benchmark, Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, Browser-based benchmarks, Performance benchmarking, Web-based testing, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 2013, WebXPRT 2015, WebXPRT 3, WebXPRT 4 | Tagged , , , , , , , , |

A note about AIXPRT

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on June 30, 2022

Recently, a member of the tech press asked us about the status of AIXPRT, our benchmark that measures machine learning inference performance. We want to share our answer here in the blog for the benefit of other readers. The writer said it seemed like we had not updated AIXPRT in a long time, and wondered whether we had any immediate plans to do so.

It’s true that we haven’t updated AIXPRT in quite some time. Unfortunately, while a few tech press publications and OEM labs began experimenting with AIXPRT testing, the benchmark never got the traction we hoped for, and we’ve decided to invest our resources elsewhere for the time being. The AIXPRT installation packages are still available for people to use or reference as they wish, but we have not updated the benchmark to work with the latest platform versions (OpenVINO, TensorFlow, etc.). It’s likely that several components in each package are out of date.

If you are interested in AIXPRT and would like us to bring it up to date, please let us know. We can’t promise that we’ll revive the benchmark, but your feedback could be a valuable contribution as we try to gauge the benchmarking community’s interest.

Justin

Posted in AI, AIXPRT, benchmark, Machine learning, OpenVINO, Performance benchmarking, TensorFlow | Tagged , , , , , , |

The XPRTs: What would you like to see?

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on June 23, 2022

One of the core principles of the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community is a commitment to valuing the feedback of both community members and the larger group of testers that use the XPRTs on a regular basis. That feedback helps us to ensure that as the XPRTs continue to grow and evolve, the resources that we offer will continue to meet the needs of those that use them.

In the past, user feedback has influenced specific aspects of our benchmarks such as the length of test runs, user interface features, results presentation, and the removal or inclusion of specific workloads. More broadly, we have also received suggestions for entirely new XPRTs and ways we might target emerging technologies or industry use cases.

As we approach the second half of 2022 and begin planning for 2023, we’re asking to hear your ideas about new XPRTs—or new features for existing XPRTs. Are you aware of hardware form factors, software platforms, or prominent applications that are difficult or impossible to evaluate using existing performance benchmarks? Are there new technologies we should be incorporating into existing XPRTs via new workloads? Can you recommend ways to improve any of the XPRTs or XPRT-related tools such as results viewers?

We are interested in your answers to these questions and any other ideas you have, so please feel free to contact us. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Justin

Posted in benchmark, Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, Future of performance evaluation, Performance benchmarking, What makes a good benchmark? | Tagged , , , , |

Our results database is your resource

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on June 16, 2022

Testers new to the XPRT benchmarks may not know about one of the free resources we offer. The XPRT results database currently holds more than 3,000 test results from over 120 sources, including major tech review publications around the world, OEMs, and independent testers. It offers a wealth of current and historical performance data across all the XPRT benchmarks and hundreds of devices.

We update the results database several times a week, adding selected results from our own internal lab testing, reliable tech media sources, and end-of-test user submissions. (After you run one of the XPRTs, you can choose to submit the results, but they don’t automatically appear in the database.) Before adding a result, we evaluate whether the score makes sense and is consistent with general expectations, which we can do only when we have sufficient system information details. For that reason, we ask testers to disclose as much hardware and software information as possible when publishing or submitting a result.

We encourage visitors to our site to explore the XPRT results database. There are three primary ways to do so. The first is by visiting the main BenchmarkXPRT results browser, which displays results entries for all of the XPRT benchmarks in chronological order (see the screenshot below). You can narrow the results by selecting a benchmark from the drop-down menu and can type values, such as vendor or the name of a tech publication, into the free-form filter field. For results we’ve produced in our lab, clicking “PT” in the Source column takes you to a page with additional disclosure information for the test system. For sources outside our lab, clicking the source name takes you to the original article or review that contains the result.

The second way to access our published results is by visiting the results page for an individual XPRT benchmark. Go the page of the benchmark that interests you, and look for the blue View Results button. Clicking it takes you to a page that displays results for only that benchmark. You can use the free-form filter on the page to filter those results, and can use the Benchmarks drop-down menu to jump to the other individual XPRT results pages.

The third way to view information in our results database is with the WebXPRT 4 results viewer. The viewer provides an information-packed, interactive environment in which users can explore data from the curated set of WebXPRT 4 results we’ve published on our site. To learn more about the viewer’s capabilities and features, check out this blog post from March.

We hope you’ll take some time to browse the information in our results database. We welcome your feedback about what you’d like to see in the future and suggestions for improvement. Our database contains the XPRT scores that we’ve gathered, but we publish them as a resource for you. Let us know what you think!

Justin

Posted in benchmark, Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, Performance benchmarking, results, results submission, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 4 | Tagged , , , , , , |

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