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Category: HDXPRT

A clarification from Brett Howse

A couple of weeks ago, I described a conversation I had with Brett Howse of AnandTech. Brett was kind enough to send a clarification of some of his remarks, which he gave us permission to share with you.

“We are at a point in time where the technology that’s been called mobile since its inception is now at a point where it makes sense to compare it to the PC. However we struggle with the comparisons because the tools used to do the testing do not always perform the same workloads. This can be a major issue when a company uses a mobile workload, and a desktop workload, but then puts the resulting scores side by side, which can lead to misinformed conclusions. This is not only a CPU issue either, since on the graphics side we have OpenGL well established, along with DirectX, in the PC space, but our mobile workloads tend to rely on OpenGL ES, with less precision asked of the GPU, and GPUs designed around this. Getting two devices to run the same work is a major challenge, but one that has people asking what the results would be.”

I really appreciate Brett taking the time to respond. What are your thoughts in these issues? Please let us know!

Eric

Please let us know

Todd Reifsteck from the Web Platform Team at Microsoft was kind enough to let me share a conversation we had last week:

Todd reported he was having problems running WebXPRT on the Edge browser. This was a surprise to us, as we’d already released a WebXPRT update to resolve Edge browser issues.

We were not seeing this problem, and as we talked with Todd we verified there was no issue in WebXPRT itself. The fix we released was working; however, we found a path through the web site that launched the previous version of WebXPRT. Once we fixed that URL to point to the latest version of WebXPRT, Todd reported that WebXPRT was working with Edge, just as we expected.

This problem would not have affected results on other browsers. The results from the previous version of WebXPRT are comparable to the current version. Compatibility with the Edge browser is the only difference between the versions.

Thanks to Todd for his help. As always, we encourage you to contact us if you have any issues or questions. We’ll do our best to resolve them as quickly as possible.

Eric

Five years later…

Five years ago this month, we started what we then called the HDXPRT Development Community. The first benchmark, HDXPRT 2011, appeared six months later. A LOT has happened since then.

We’ve grown to six benchmarks (HDXPRT, TouchXPRT, WebXPRT, MobileXPRT, BatteryXPRT, and CrXPRT) with plenty of updates. As a result, we had to change the name to the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, though we’ve come to refer to the benchmarks themselves as the XPRTs.

To tell the world about the XPRTs and the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, we’ve written over 200 blog entries. We’ve created videos, a training course, infographics, and white papers. We’ve met members of the community at their companies, via webinars, and at trade shows. We’ve quite literally traveled around the world to shows in Las Vegas, Barcelona, Taipei, and Shenzhen.

As a result, the community has grown to about 150 individuals at over 60 companies and organizations. People have downloaded or run the benchmarks over 100,000 times in over 44 countries. The XPRTs have been cited over 3,800 times in a wide variety of websites around the world.

Yes, a lot has happened over these five years.

On behalf of the BenchmarkXPRT team, I want to convey my sincere thanks to all of you for your involvement over these years. I’m really looking forward to what the next five years will look like. We’re just getting started!

A couple of things

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

Back to Barcelona

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:

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The busiest year ever!

As 2014 winds down, it’s a good time to look back at the year. And what a year it has been! This is the year that the XPRTs really went global. The benchmarks are in wider use than ever. The community continues to grow.

Here are a few of the big things that happened this year:

 

It’s going to be hard to top this year, but we are certainly going to try! There’s another video coming soon. We’re already working on WebXPRT 2015. (If you haven’t commented on the WebXPRT 2015 design document yet, it’s not too late.) We’re making plans for MWC 2015. And there’s a lot more in the works!

Whatever your traditions are, we hope you have a wonderful holiday season. See you in 2015.

Eric

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