Category: Mobile World Congress

The Mobile World Congress 2023 recap video is live!

on March 14, 2023

Once again, the talented studio team here at Principled Technologies has worked with the XPRT team to put together some great content. This week, we published a recap video of Mark’s recent trip to Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 in Barcelona. In the video, Mark discusses how “velocity” was the headline theme of this year’s MWC, but infrastructure was the true backbone of the show. The challenges of developing the infrastructure necessary for tomorrow’s tech aren’t limited to obvious topics like 5G deployment, bandwidth, and accessibility; they also include “soft” infrastructure topics like security, management, and reliability. As everything gets faster, we’ll need tools such as the XPRTs to provide reliable information about which devices can handle the increased demands of tomorrow’s tech.

We encourage you to check out the video, along with Mark’s blog post from the show and MWC-related photos on social media. To view the video, you can follow this link or click the screenshot below. If you attended or followed MWC this year and have any thoughts about how the XPRTs can help to evaluate cutting-edge technologies, we’d love to hear from you!

Justin

Posted in 5G, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, Future of performance evaluation, Mobile data, Mobile devices, Mobile World Congress, Trade Shows | Tagged 5G, Barcelona, benchmark, BenchmarkXPRT, infrastructure, Mobile World Congress, MWC, MWC23, video |

The XPRTs will be at Mobile World Congress later this month!

By Justin Greene

on February 16, 2023

Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 kicks off on February 27^th, and we’re excited that Mark Van Name will be attending the event for the first time since the last pre-pandemic show in 2019. Each year, MWC offers a great opportunity to examine the new trends and technologies that will shape mobile technology in the years to come. The major themes of this year’s show include the latest advances in 5G and IoT technologies, along with what GSMA is calling “Reality+.” Reality+ refers to the intersection of AI, AR, VR, and 5G, and the potential impacts of these immersive technologies on our future.

Mark will be sharing his thoughts from this year’s show here in the XPRT blog, so be sure to stayed tuned. Will you be attending MWC this year? If so, let us know!

Justin

Posted in 5G, AI, AR, Augmented reality, BenchmarkXPRT, IoT, Mobile World Congress, Mobile World Congress, Trade Shows, VR | Tagged 5G, AI, AR, augmented reality, Barcelona, BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, GSMA, Internet of Things, IoT, Mobile World Congress, MWC, virtual reality, VR |

The XPRTs in 2019: Looking back on an exciting and productive year

By Justin Greene

on December 19, 2019

2019 is winding down, and we want to take this opportunity to review another exciting and productive year for the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community. Readers of our newsletter are familiar with the stats and updates we post in each month’s mailing, but we know that not all our blog readers receive the newsletter, so we’ve compiled the highlights below.

Trade shows
Earlier this year, Justin attended CES in Las Vegas and Mark travelled to MWC Barcelona. These shows help us keep up with the latest industry trends and gather insights that help to lay the groundwork for XPRT development in the years ahead.

Benchmarks
In the past year, we released MobileXPRT 3, HDXPRT 4, and AIXPRT, our new AI benchmark tool that helps you evaluate a system’s machine learning inference performance. There’s much more to come in 2020 with AIXPRT and several other projects, so expect more news about benchmark development early in the year.

Web mentions
In 2019 so far, journalists, advertisers, and analysts have referenced the XPRTs over 5,000 times, including mentions in more than 190 articles and 1,350 device reviews. This represents a more than 50% increase over 2018.

Downloads and confirmed runs
To date, we’ve had more than 24,800 benchmark downloads and 153,000 confirmed runs in 2019, increases of more than 8% and 10%, respectively, over 2018. Within the last month, our most popular benchmark, WebXPRT, passed the 500,000-run milestone! WebXPRT continues to be an industry-standard performance benchmark upon which OEM labs, vendors, and leading tech press outlets rely.

XPRT Tech Spotlight
We put 47 new devices in the XPRT Tech Spotlight throughout the year and published updated back-to-school, Black Friday, and holiday showcases to help buyers compare devices.

Media and interactive tools
We published a new XPRTs around the world infographic and an interactive AIXPRT installation package selector tool. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback about the tool. We encourage you to give it a try if you’re curious about AIXPRT but aren’t sure how to get started.

We’re thankful for everyone who used the XPRTs, joined the community, and sent questions and suggestions throughout 2019. This will be our last blog post for 2019, but there’s much more to come in 2020, including some exciting new developments. Stay tuned in early January for updates!

Justin

Posted in AIXPRT, benchmark, BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, CES, HDXPRT 4, Mobile World Congress, MobileXPRT 3, Trade Shows, WebXPRT, XPRT Tech Spotlight | Tagged benchmark, BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, CES, HDXPRT 4, MobileXPRT 3, MWC, WebXPRT 3 |

More, faster, better: The future according to Mobile World Congress 2019

By Mark Van Name

on March 7, 2019

More is more data, which the trillions of devices in the coming Internet of Things will be pumping through our air into our (computing) clouds in hitherto unseen quantities.

Faster is the speed at which tomorrow’s 5G networks will carry this data—and the responses and actions from our automated assistants (and possibly overlords).

Better is the quality of the data analysis and recommendations, thanks primarily to the vast army of AI-powered analytics engines that will be poring over everything digital the planet has to say.

Swimming through this perpetual data tsunami will be we humans and our many devices, our laptops and tablets and smartphones and smart watches and, ultimately, implants. If we are to believe the promise of this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona—and of course I do want to believe it, who wouldn’t?—the result of all of this will be a better world for all humanity, no person left behind. As I walked the show floor, I could not help but feel and want to embrace its optimism.

The catch, of course, is that we have a tremendous amount of work to do between where we are today and this fabulous future.

We must, for example, make sure that every computing node that will contribute to these powerful AI programs is up to the task. From the smartphone to the datacenter, AI will end up being a very distributed and very demanding workload. That’s one of the reasons we’ve been developing AIXPRT. Without tools that let us accurately compare different devices, the industry won’t be able to keep delivering the levels of performance improvements that we need to realize these dreams.

We must also think a lot about how to accurately measure all other aspects of our devices’ performance, because the demands this future will place on them are going to be significant. Fortunately, the always evolving XPRT family of tools is up to the task.

The coming 5G revolution, like all tech leaps forward before it, will not come evenly. Different 5G devices will end up behaving differently, some better and some worse. That fact, plus our constant and growing reliance on bandwidth, suggests that maybe the XPRT community should turn its attention to the task of measuring bandwidth. What do you think?

One thing is certain: we at the Benchmark XPRT Development Community have a role to play in building the tools necessary to test the tech the world will need to deliver on the promise of this exciting trade show. We look forward to that work.

Posted in 5G, AI, AIXPRT, Automation, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Datacenter, Future of performance evaluation, Internet of things, IoT, Machine learning, Mobile devices, Mobile World Congress, Networking, Performance of computing devices, Phones, Tablets, Trade Shows | Tagged 5G, AI, AIXPRT, Barcelona, BenchmarkXPRT, datacenter, Internet of Things, IoT, machine learning, Mobile World Congress, MWC, phones |

MWCS18 and AIXPRT: a new video

By Justin Greene

on July 12, 2018

A few weeks ago, Bill shared his first impressions from this year’s Mobile World Congress Shanghai (MWCS). “5G +” was the major theme, and there was a heavy emphasis on 5G + AI. This week, we published a video about Bill’s MWCS experience and the role that the XPRTs can play in evaluating emerging technologies such as 5G, AI, and VR. Check it out!

You can read more about AIXPRT development here. We’re still accepting responses to the AIXPRT Request for Comments, so if you would like to share your ideas on developing an AI/machine learning benchmark, please feel free to contact us.

Justin

Posted in 5G, AI, AIXPRT, AR, Augmented reality, Future of performance evaluation, Machine learning, Mobile devices, Mobile World Congress, Mobile World Congress, Performance benchmarking, Virtual reality | Tagged 5G, AI, AIXPRT, MWCS18, Shanghai, VR |

Thoughts from MWC Shanghai 2018

By Bill Catchings

on June 28, 2018

Ni hao from Shanghai! It is amazing the change that happens in a year. This year’s MWC Shanghai, like last year’s, took up about half of the Shanghai New International Expo Centre (SNIEC). “5G +” is the major theme and, unlike last year, 5G is not something in the distant future. It is now assumed to be in progress.

The biggest of the pluses was AI, with a number of booths explicitly sporting 5G + AI signage. There were also 5G plus robots, cars, and cloud services. Many of those are really about AI as well. The show makes it feel like 5G is everywhere and will make everything better (or at least a lot faster). And Asia is leading the way.

[caption id="attachment_3447" align="alignleft" width="640"] 5G + robotics at MWCS 18.[/caption]

Most of the booths touted their 5G support as they did last year, but rather than talking about the future, they tried to say that their 5G was now. They claimed their products were in real-world tests with anticipated deployment schedules. One of the keynote speakers talked about 1.2 billion 5G connections by 2025, with more than half of those in Asia. The purported scale and speed of the transition to 5G is staggering.

[caption id="attachment_3449" align="alignleft" width="640"] The keynote stage, displaying some big numbers.[/caption]

The last two halls I visited showed that world is not all 5G and AI. These halls looked at current fun applications of mobile technologies and companies developing technologies in the near future. MWC allowed children into one of the halls, where they (and we adults) could fly drones and experience VR technology. I watched in some amusement as people crashed drones, rode bikes with VR gear to simulate horses, were 3D scanned, and generally tried out new tech that didn’t always work.

The second hall included small booths from new companies working on future technologies that might be ready “4 years from now” (4YFN). These companies did not have much to show yet, but each booth displayed the company name and a short phrase summing up their future tech. That led to “Deepscent Labs is a smart scent data company,” ChineSpain is a “Marketplace of experiences for Chinese tourists in Spain,” and “Juice is a tech-based music contents startup that creates an ecosystem of music.” The mind boggles!

The XPRTs’ foray into AI with AIXPRT seems well timed based on this show. Other areas from this show that may be worth considering for the XPRTs are 5G and the cloud. We would love to hear your thoughts on those areas. We know they are important, but do you need the XPRTs and their emphasis on real-world benchmarks and workloads in those areas? Drop us a line and let us know!

Bill

Posted in 5G, AI, AIXPRT, AR, Augmented reality, Automated cars, Future of performance evaluation, IoT, Mobile data, Mobile devices, Mobile World Congress, Virtual reality | Tagged 5G, AI, China, mobile, Mobile World Shanghai, MWC, Shanghai, VR |

Category: Mobile World Congress

The Mobile World Congress 2023 recap video is live!

The XPRTs will be at Mobile World Congress later this month!

The XPRTs in 2019: Looking back on an exciting and productive year

More, faster, better: The future according to Mobile World Congress 2019

MWCS18 and AIXPRT: a new video

Thoughts from MWC Shanghai 2018

Check out the other XPRTs: