BenchmarkXPRT Blog banner

Category: Trade Shows

The XPRTs will be at CES 2023 next month!

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on December 15, 2022

Next month, I’ll be representing the XPRTs at CES Las Vegas for the first time since January 2020! After almost three years of pandemic-related disruption and uncertainty, it’s exciting to return to one of the largest tech shows in the world.

CES always provides a great opportunity to survey emerging tech and industry trends, get hands-on with cutting-edge hardware, and gather insights that help lay the groundwork for XPRT development in the years ahead. I look forward to sharing my thoughts and impressions from CES here in the first XPRT blog post of 2023. We typically post on Thursdays, but because the show runs from Thursday through Sunday this year, that post will go live on Friday, January 6.

If you’ll be attending CES 2023, and would like to meet and discuss any aspect of the XPRTs, please let me know!

Justin

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT, CES, Consumer Electronics Show, Las Vegas, Trade Shows | Tagged , , , , , |

CES 2020: AI in action and a “smart” future

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on January 9, 2020

During last year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), one question kept coming to mind as I walked the floor: Are we approaching the tipping point where AI truly affects most people in meaningful ways on a daily basis? I think it’s safe to say that we’ve reached that point as a result of AI integration with phones. After all, for many of us, AI improves the quality of our photography, recommends words and phrases as we text and search the web, and lets us know when to allow extra drive time because traffic is heavy.

However, for me, the most intriguing aspects of this year’s CES are the glimpses of how AI will change every area of our lives, with and without mobile devices. The show floor is jam-packed with ways to integrate AI with everything from athletic shoes to pet care to the kitchen sink. Many of these ideas are fascinating on their own, and they’re all part of a much bigger picture. The next few years will see increased AI utilization in medicine, transportation, agriculture, water and energy distribution, natural resource protection, and many more areas. Our personal smart devices will connect to smart vehicles, smart homes, smart grids, and smart cities. In the near future, CES shows won’t need AI sections because AI will be a part of everything.

At each step of this journey, people will need objective data about how well their tech can handle the demands of common AI workloads. We’re excited that AIXPRT is already becoming a go-to tool for testing inference performance on laptops, desktops, and servers. There’s much more to come with AIXPRT in 2020, along with news about XPRTs in the datacenter, so stay tuned to the blog for exciting developments in the weeks to come!

I’ll leave you with pics from three of my favorite displays at this year’s show. The first is a model of Toyota’s Woven City. Toyota announced plans to build an entire mini city on existing company land near Mount Fuji. The city will house 2,000 people and will serve as an enormous real-time lab where designers and engineers can test ubiquitous AI and sensor technology. Toyota will also design the city to be fully sustainable with the use of hydrogen fuel cells and solar panels.

The second picture shows the electric Hyundai Urban Air Mobility prototype. Hyundai is partnering with Uber on this project, and the planned vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) craft will seat five passengers plus a pilot, have a range of 60 miles, and be able to recharge in less than 10 minutes. These concepts aren’t new, but battery and material sciences technologies are progressing to the point that this one may get off the ground!

The third picture shows BrainCo’s AI Prosthetic Hand display. The hand provides amputees with new levels of dexterity compared to previous prosthetics, and it uses AI to learn from the user’s patterns of movement. The idea is that the accuracy of gestures and grips will improve over time, allowing users to accomplish tasks that are impossible with existing technology. A young man in the booth was using the hand to paint beautiful and precise Chinese calligraphy. Very cool!

Justin

Posted in AI, AIXPRT, CES, Datacenter, Future of performance evaluation, Machine learning, Mobile devices, recommender system, Trade Shows | Tagged , , , , , , |

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

Justin Greene
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 , , , , , , , |

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

Mark Van Name
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 , , , , , , , , , , , |

AI is the heartbeat of CES 2019

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on January 10, 2019

This year’s CES features a familiar cast of characters: gigantic, super-thin 8K screens; plenty of signage promising the arrival of 5G; robots of all shapes, sizes, and levels of competency; and acres of personal grooming products that you can pair with your phone. In all seriousness, however, one main question keeps coming to mind as I walk the floor: Are we approaching the tipping point where AI truly starts to affect most people in meaningful ways on a daily basis? I think we’re still a couple of years away from ubiquitous AI, but it’s the heartbeat of this year’s show, and it’s going play a part in almost everything we do in the very near future. AI applications at this year’s show include manufacturing, transportation, energy, medicine, education, photography, communications, farming, grocery shopping, fitness, sports, defense, and entertainment, just to name a few. The AI revolution is just starting, but once it gets going, AI will continually reshape society for decades to come. This year’s show reinforces our decision to explore the roles that the XPRTs, beginning with AIXPRT, can play in the AI revolution.

Now for the fun stuff. Here’s a peek at a couple of my favorite displays so far. As is often the case, the most awe-inducing displays at CES are those that overwhelm attendees with light and sound. LG’s enormous curved OLED wall, dubbed the Massive Curve of Nature, was truly something to behold.

IMG_0268 - Copy

Another big draw has been Bell’s Nexus prototype, a hybrid-electric VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) air taxi. Some journalists can’t resist calling it a flying car, but I refuse to do so, because it has nothing in common with cars apart from the fact that people sit in it and use it to travel from place to place. As Elon Musk once said of an earlier, but similar, concept, “it’s just a helicopter in helicopter’s clothing.” Semantics aside, it’s intriguing to imagine urban environments full of nimble aircraft that are quieter, easier to fly, and more energy efficient than traditional helicopters, especially if they’re paired with autonomous driving technologies.

Version 2

Finally, quite a few companies are displaying props that put some of the “reality” back into “virtual reality.” Driving and flight simulators with full range of motion that are small enough to fit in someone’s basement or game room, full-body VR suits that control your temperature and deliver electrical stimulus based on game play (yikes!), and portable roller-coaster-like VR rides were just a few of the attractions.

IMG_0203 - Copy

It’s been a fascinating show so far!

Justin

Posted in AI, Augmented reality, Automation, CES, Drones, Education, IoT, Machine learning, Trade Shows, Virtual reality, VR Demo | Tagged , , , , , , , , |

New XPRTs for the new year

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on January 3, 2019

Happy 2019! January is already a busy time for the XPRTs, so we want to share a quick preview of what community members can expect in the coming months.

The MobileXPRT 3 community preview (CP) is still open, but draws to a close on January 18th. If you are not familiar with the updates and changes we implemented in the newest version of MobileXPRT, you can read more in the blog. Members can access this APK on the MobileXPRT tab in the Members’ Area. We also posted an installation guide that provides both a general overview of the app and detailed instructions for each step. The entire process takes about five minutes on most devices. If you haven’t already, give it a try!

We also recently published the first AIXPRT Request for Comments (RFC) preview build, an early version of one of the tools we’re developing to evaluate machine learning performance. You can find more details in Bill’s most recent blog post and on AIXPRT.com. Only BenchmarkXPRT Development Community members have access to our RFCs and the opportunity to provide feedback. However, because we’re seeking broad input from experts in this field, we’ll gladly make anyone interested in participating a member. To gain access to the AIXPRT repository, please send us a request.

Work on the HDXPRT 4 CP candidate build continues, and we hope to publish the preview for community members this month. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we work to get this right. We think it will be worth the wait.

On a general note, I’ll be travelling to CES 2019 in Las Vegas next week. CES is a great opportunity for us to survey emerging tech and industry trends, and I look forward to sharing my thoughts from the show. If you’ll be there and would like to discuss any aspect of the XPRTs in person, let me know.

Justin

Posted in AI, AIXPRT, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, CES, Collaborative benchmark development, Community Preview, Future of performance evaluation, HDXPRT, HDXPRT 4, HDXPRT development process, Machine learning, MobileXPRT, MobileXPRT 3, Performance benchmarking, Trade Shows | Tagged , , , , , , |

Check out the other XPRTs:

Forgot your password?
© Principled Technologies, Inc. 2024   |   Privacy policy

Cookie Notice: Our website uses cookies to deliver a smooth experience by storing logins and saving user information. By continuing to use our site, you agree with our usage of cookies as our privacy policy outlines.

x