Category: HDXPRT

Broadening our appeal

on October 31, 2013

As I mentioned last week, we’ve asked the PT design team to help improve the XPRT benchmarks. I’m learning a lot working with them. As someone who’s been involved with benchmarking a long time, it can be a shock to realize that there are people who think “ms” is a magazine, “geomean” has something to do with the environment, and “UX” sounds like it would be a great name for a band. But the fact is that most consumers don’t need to know any of these terms, so our benchmarks shouldn’t rely on them, either.

This collaboration already paying off. The PT design team rewrote the MobileXPRT FAQ, making it much more extensive, accessible, and fun to read. We think the new FAQ is greatly improved, and it’s certainly more informative. We’ll be upgrading the FAQs for the other benchmarks in the near future.

Our efforts are going far beyond FAQs. Data presentation, graphics, the basic UI design philosophy—everything is on the table. Let us know what you think by emailing benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechnolgies.com or by posting on the forums.

Eric

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Posted in BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Collaborative benchmark development, Let us know your thoughts, MobileXPRT |

Designated Drivers

By Eric Hale

on August 29, 2013

As we mentioned in last week’s blog On to the next thing, we have seen some problems running HDXPRT 2012 on the Windows 8.1 preview, build 9460. To date, the failures we’ve seen have been in Media Espresso’s Power Director on systems using third and fourth generation Intel Core processors.

We are happy to say that HDXPRT 2012 runs fine on the preview of Windows 8.1 when using the Windows 8.1 Preview Beta Graphics Driver. We are continuing to test, but things are looking good. You can get the graphic driver at communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-21232. We tested with version 15.33.10.3214, which is the latest version available as I am writing this.

If you see problems when running HDXPRT 2012, please let us know.

As I said last week, we are pushing forward on the development of HDXPRT 2013. We are looking forward to releasing a preview to the community in the next few weeks.

Eric

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Posted in HDXPRT, HDXPRT 2012, Windows 8.1 |

On to the next thing

By Eric Hale

on August 22, 2013

Last week, we released MobileXPRT 2013 to the public and published it as a free app on Google Play. On Monday, we will release the source code to the community. It hasn’t been long since we released the source code for MobileXPRT CP 1.1, but it’s an important part of the community model that the source for the current version is available to the community.

While we were putting the finishing touches on MobileXPRT, we’ve been hard at work on HDXPRT 2013. The feedback on HDXPRT made it clear that the benchmark should be smaller, faster, and easier to install. We have been working to keep all the value of the benchmark, and update the workloads to reflect current usage, even as we slim it down.

Speaking of HDXPRT, as we mentioned in The show is in previews, HDXPRT 2012 has issues running on Windows 8.1. However, we have had some success getting HDXPRT to run on Windows 8.1 by using beta drivers from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA. We are still investigating this, and hope to have a general workaround for this soon.

There’s lots more stuff in the pipeline. Exciting times ahead!

Eric

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Posted in HDXPRT 2012, HDXPRT 2013, MobileXPRT 2013 source, Windows 8.1 |

The show is in previews

By Eric Hale

on July 11, 2013

I love theater, both as an actor and as an audience member. Seeing a show in preview means you have the chance to see what might be the next big thing before the critics do. It also means you may be watching all the things they need to fix before opening night.

Microsoft released the Windows 8.1 preview at the end of June. Of course we had to give it a look. After installing it, we ran the compatible XPRT benchmarks: HDXPRT, TouchXPRT, and WebXPRT. (Because MobileXPRT is Android based, it does not run on Windows.)

WebXPRT ran without any problems. To date, WebXPRT has run on everything we’ve thrown at it.

We took a Windows 8 system with TouchXPRT already installed and upgraded it to Windows 8.1. The previously installed version of TouchXPRT had some problems. However, when we did a clean install of Windows 8.1 and then installed TouchXPRT, it ran just fine.

HDXPRT failed while configuring the applications. We are looking into this and hope to have a solution soon.

I’m not going to talk about the results, because this is a preview of Windows. By the time of the official release, the results from the benchmarks certainly may change.

The Windows 8.1 RTM is currently set for August. I’m looking forward to seeing how it performs!

Eric

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Posted in HDXPRT 2012, TouchXPRT, WebXPRT, Windows 8.1 |

Presentation XPRT

By Bill Catchings

on May 9, 2013

A few weeks ago, the Mobile PC Extended Battery Life Working Group (EBL WG) asked me to give a presentation about the BenchmarkXPRT benchmarks during one of their meetings. The group started a little over 10 years ago and is an industry organization focusing on achieving all-day battery life in mobile PC platforms.

There was a catch, of course. The meeting was this week, in Taipei. Luckily, we were able to grant the request without racking up any frequent flier miles—thanks to the wonders of technology, I was able to give the presentation remotely.

Taipei is 12 hours ahead of us here on the East Coast, so I made arrangements to give the presentation last night at 9:30 pm, making it 9:30 am the next day there—the first thing on the agenda for today. (Oh, the vagaries of time zones!)

During the one-hour session we talked about HDXPRT, TouchXPRT, WebXPRT and MobileXPRT (which, for the moment, is how we internally refer to the XPRT formerly known as PhoneXPRT). And of course, we discussed the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community. It went well, and we had some great questions from the group.

It went so well, in fact, that I’d love to do it again. I like talking about the development community and the XPRTs, and would welcome the chance to present to other groups. If you are interested or know an organization that is, you can email us at benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

Bill

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Posted in BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Collaborative benchmark development, HDXPRT, MobileXPRT, PhoneXPRT, TouchXPRT |

Extreme makeover

By Eric Hale

on April 25, 2013

Last week, we unveiled redesigned Web pages for BenchmarkXPRT. We’ve been working on this redesign for a while. We think you’ll find the pages to be a lot sleeker and more attractive. The HDXPRT page, for example, is far less cluttered and easier to navigate. There’s a new white papers page. The members’ area has a new tabbed design that will let you access the member resources for any benchmark form a single page.

We will be redesigning the blog and forums over the next few weeks. Log into the forum or send an e-mail to benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechnologies.com and tell us what you think about the new design!

As we mentioned in the blog post What a week!, WebXPRT does not collect any personally identifying information. (The WebXPRT data collection page details all the information the benchmark collects.) The benchmark does not attempt to verify that the user agent string is correct under the assumption that the user or browser had some reason for setting it the way it is.

This has caused some people to be confused when, for example, the results for a phone running the stock Android browser say that the phone used Safari. Most modern browsers have the ability to change the user agent string and misidentify themselves, as that version of the Android browser did by default. In fact, you can usually override the browser’s default, should you want to. For example, Google Chrome version 26.0, the version I’m using right now, allows you to choose from multiple versions of IE, Firefox, Chrome, iPhone, iPad, Android, and others. You can even type in a custom string.

So, if you think WebXPRT misidentified your browser, it’s worth checking the user agent string. The instructions for doing this vary by browser, but are usually pretty straightforward. If you’re curious about why browsers offer this feature, you can search for “user agent spoofing” to find explanations of the pros and cons.

Eric

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Posted in BenchmarkXPRT, HDXPRT, Principled Technologies, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 2013 results |

Category: HDXPRT

Broadening our appeal

Designated Drivers

On to the next thing

The show is in previews

Presentation XPRT

Extreme makeover

Check out the other XPRTs: