Category: CrXPRT

Lots of things are happening!

on April 9, 2015

The WebXPRT 2015 community preview hasn’t even been out two weeks yet, but there are already hundreds of runs in the database. If you haven’t checked it out yet, now is a good time! (login required)

As I mentioned last week, Bill and Justin are at Intel Developer Forum 2015 – Shenzhen. Here’s their home away from home this week.

Bill and Justin have been having a lot of good conversations and have found a lot of interest in an open development community. We’re looking forward to having even more members in Asia soon!

On Monday we released the CrXPRT white paper. If you want to know more about the concepts behind CrXPRT 2015, how it was developed, how the results are calculated, or anything else about CrXPRT, the white paper is a great place to start.
Finally, the MobileXPRT 2015 design document is coming in the next couple of weeks. What would you like to see in the next version of MobileXPRT? 64-bit support? New types of tests? Improvements to the UI? Everything is on the table. This is the time to make your voice heard!
Eric

Posted in CrXPRT, IDF, Principled Technologies, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 2015, White papers |

A couple of things

By Eric Hale

on April 2, 2015

We’ve heard about a couple of issues this week. The HDXPRT 2014 Convert Videos test uses the MediaEspresso application and requires hardware acceleration be configured. On some systems, this setting is not configuring automatically, which may result in lower scores. We’re working on a solution, but in the meantime there’s an easy workaround.

We’ve also found that some Chromebooks report extremely low battery use, as low as 0%, for the first couple iterations of the CrXPRT battery life test. This can cause CrXPRT to report results with a very wide confidence interval, with an interval greater than 15%. We’re looking at ways to detect and compensate for this. However, if you see results with a very wide confidence interval, we recommend that you use the rundown test.

In other news, we’ve been talking about Intel Developer Forum 2015 – Shenzhen for weeks, and the time is finally here! Bill and Justin get on the plane tomorrow. If you’d like to talk about the XPRTs, or any of PT’s other offerings, Bill and the team would be happy to meet with you!

Eric

Posted in Collaborative benchmark development, CrXPRT, Google Chrome, HDXPRT, IDF |

Back to Barcelona

By Eric Hale

on February 26, 2015

It’s time for one of Bill’s favorite shows of the year. Mobile World Congress (MWC) starts Monday in Barcelona. Talking about technology in Barcelona, now that’s a plum assignment!

Bill’s got a lot to talk about. Since last year’s MWC, here’s some of what’s happened:

We released two new benchmarks to the public, BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android and CrXPRT 2015.
We released updates to two benchmarks, TouchXPRT 2014 and HDXPRT 2014.
We created our first training course, for BatteryXPRT.
We released two videos Mine is better: TouchXPRT 2014 and CrXPRT in action.

(more…)

Posted in BatteryXPRT 2014 for Android, BenchmarkXPRT development community, CrXPRT, HDXPRT 2014, Mobile World Congress, TouchXPRT 2014, Trade Shows |

A guest blog from Wilson Cheng at Acer Inc.

By Wilson Cheng

on February 12, 2015

Two years ago, I got a job to evaluate cross-platform benchmarks for comparing Windows and Android.

Usually, Web-based benchmarks focus on only Java-script and HTML5 functionality. I found WebXPRT is easy to use and includes the tasks that you do every day. It reliably tests the user experience and gives a simple score for comparison. I suggested to our manager that we use it to evaluate our platform and he agreed.

Recently, Chromebooks have become very popular. Testing the battery life of Chromebooks has been difficult because you have needed to use the power_LoadTest image from the Chromium project or the test image from the Chrome OS Partners Web site to do power load testing. Without reimaging the system, you couldn’t test battery life. Because CrXPRT is designed to test battery life as well as performance on ChromeOS, this extra step is no longer needed. We can run CrXPRT without updating the test image, which is very useful in our battery life testing.

The advantage of XPRT benchmarks is that they are easy to use and give real-world results. The disadvantage is that they are not yet popular on review sites.

Posted in Android, BenchmarkXPRT, Chrome OS, Chromebooks, CrXPRT, Google Chrome, WebXPRT, What makes a good benchmark? |

An updated CrXPRT 2015 build is available

By Eric Hale

on February 10, 2015

Today we’re releasing a new build of CrXPRT 2015 (v1.0.2) in the Chrome Web Store. The updates included in this build correct the handling of outlier scores for individual workloads, check the duration of each battery-life test iteration, and introduce a check to ensure that the system is not plugged in during battery-life testing. The tests have not changed, and the method of calculating the overall score and battery-life score is the same, so the main scores are comparable with previous CrXPRT scores.

We published the update today in the Chrome Web Store as of 3:00 PM EST, but it may take some time for the update to appear on your system. You may have to manually approve the update notice when it appears on your system.

If you have any questions about the update or any other XPRT-related topic, feel free to contact us at BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

Posted in Battery life, Chrome OS, Chromebooks, CrXPRT, Google Chrome |

Polishing the chrome

By Eric Hale

on February 5, 2015

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

Posted in Battery life, Chrome OS, Chromebooks, Collaborative benchmark development, CrXPRT |

Category: CrXPRT

Lots of things are happening!

A couple of things

Back to Barcelona

A guest blog from Wilson Cheng at Acer Inc.

An updated CrXPRT 2015 build is available

Polishing the chrome

Check out the other XPRTs: