Category: WebXPRT

Some good questions

on January 24, 2013

On Tuesday, we had a Webinar for the BenchmarkXPRT community. This Webinar covered the material that Bill would have given in individual presentations at CES. As such, it was an overview of the XPRT family.

The Webinar was well attended. We will be posting the slides and the recording of the Webinar online soon. However, we got some good questions, and thought we’d share our responses with you.

How will updates to TouchXPRT, and other benchmarks, affect results? We will avoid affecting results as much as possible. However, when updates do affect results, we will disclose the effect and the testing we performed to verify it.

Will we provide a way for benchmark users to talk to each other about support issues, perhaps via OpenBlog? We had envisioned the benchmark forums providing this opportunity. However, we are very happy to look into ways to make community communication easier and more effective.

Do you provide company memberships, as opposed to individual memberships? Not currently, although we will certainly look into this. We have no formal voting mechanism, as SPEC and some other organizations have. We may get there one day, but it’s not currently an issue. If your concern is about paying multiple membership fees, contact us, and we’ll work with you to avoid that.

In HDXPRT, can you select the CPU or GPU for video conversion and control the quality of the conversion? We have not investigated this. HDXPRT installs the applications using the default settings. However, because HDXPRT installs the applications in a separate step from running the test, it might be possible to manually change the benchmark settings and then run HDXPRT. We will be looking into this and reporting on it going forward.

How does the server influence WebXPRT results? We have run WebXPRT hosted on different servers in different locations, and seen little influence on the results. However, as part of preparing the WebXPRT general release, we will characterize and document the influence of the server.

Feel free to let us know what you think about these or any other topics. As I said earlier, we’ll be posting the whole Webinar online soon.

Eric

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Posted in Benchmarking, Benchmarks in general, CES, HDXPRT, TouchXPRT, WebXPRT |

Busy start to a new year

By Eric Hale

on January 5, 2013

I hope everyone had a great holiday, and that you are looking forward to a wonderful 2013!

Since the last blog post, more reviews using WebXPRT and TouchXPRT have appeared.

Anandtech published The Clover Trail (Atom Z2760) Review: Acer’s W510 Tested, which used both benchmarks.
Anandtech also published The x86 Power Myth Busted: In-Depth Clover Trail Power Analysis, which uses these benchmarks when looking at the power consumption of Atom vs. ARM processors.
PCWorld is including TouchXPRT results for devices such as the Lenovo ThinkPad S230u-33474HU Twist, Acer Iconia W700-6465, Sony Duo 11 SVD11213CXB, and others.

Use of the benchmarks is growing!

As we mentioned in the blog post The newest member of the family, we are we are reorganizing the XPRT family of benchmarks under the umbrella of BenchmarkXPRT. The next step is bringing the BenchmarkXPRT page on-line. That is happening Monday. BenchmarkXPRT.com is now the place to go for the latest news about all the benchmarks. As part of this reorganization, the What’s New section of the HDXPRT home page will be moving.

We will also be creating a new Facebook page and Twitter feed. We think this new organization will better suit the needs of the community as we go forward.

LATE BREAKING NEWS: We unfortunately will not be able to be at CES. We will be holding Webinars soon to tell you all the latest developments and listen to your opinions.

Eric

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Posted in CES, TouchXPRT, WebXPRT |

Ending the year with a bang!

By Eric Hale

on January 2, 2013

As we promised in the blog post The newest member of the family, we made the WebXPRT 2013 community preview available this week. It has already been used in a review! The AnandTech review of the Acer Iconia W510 includes results from the WebXPRT 2013 community preview for that device and for the Microsoft Surface RT and the Apple iPad 4. The review has results from the TouchXPRT 2013 community preview for the Acer Iconia W510, Microsoft Surface RT, and the ASUS VivoTab RT as well.

Obviously, we’ve been doing some testing ourselves. Here’s a sampling of the devices on which we’ve successfully run WebXPRT:

Device	Processor	Operating system	Browser	Score	Confidence interval
HP Envy 2	1.8 GHz Intel Atom Z2760	Windows 8	Internet Explorer 10.0.92	201	+/- 6
Asus VivoTab RT	1.2 GHz Tegra 3 T30L	Windows RT	Internet Explorer 10.0.92	160	+/- 5
Kindle Fire	1.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A9	Android OS 2.3 (customized: 6.3.1_user_4107720)	Safari 5	92	+/- 2
ASUS-made Google Nexus 7	1.2 GHz Tegra 3 T30L	Android 4.2	Chrome 18	201	+/- 4
Motorola DroidX phone	1 GHz TI OMAP3630-1000	Android 4.5.621	Browser version 2.3.4	26	+/- 1
iPhone 5	1.3 GHz Apple A6	iOS 6.0.2	Safari 6	168	+/- 2
iPad mini	1GHz Apple A5	iOS 6.0.2	Safari 6	110	+/- 1
iPad 4	1.4 GHz Apple A6X	iOS 6.0.1	Safari 6	180	+/- 2

As the results above show, WebXPRT can run on a wide range of devices. We are working to get results on lots of different devices and would like your help. We’ll set up a forum thread for results that starts with these. We’ll then add additional ones we produce. Please respond in the thread with results you get.

In addition to performance results, the WebXPRT 2013 community preview also provides a report on the HTML 5 capabilities of your device. For those who want to know more about the capabilities of HTML 5, there’s more good news. The W3C community released the feature-complete spec for HTML 5 and Canvas 2D this week.

You can find an explanation of scenarios in the WebXPRT 2013 community preview, and an explanation of how it calculates its results in the WebXPRT 2013 CP1 Overview. Let us know what you think. There’s still time to help us shape the final version of both WebXPRT 2013 and TouchXPRT 2013.

Eric

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Posted in Benchmarking, HTML5, Let us know your thoughts, Performance testing on tablets, TouchXPRT, Web-based testing, WebXPRT |

The newest member of the family

By Eric Hale

on December 14, 2012

In his blog post TouchXPRT Web test update, Bill mentioned that we would be releasing Web-based workloads for the community to try out. Although we developed them as part of TouchXPRT, the cross-platform nature of these tests suggested to us that they should stand on their own.

After seeking community input, we have decided to make them a separate benchmark. So, we are proud to announce WebXPRT. The first community preview will be available mid-next week. WebXPRT CP1 contains four workloads: Photo Effects, Face Detect, Stocks Dashboard, and Offline Notes. Because the workloads are all HMTL5 based, they run on a wide variety of devices and operating systems—from iPad tablets to Android phones to Windows computers.

As with all community previews, we are very interested in your opinion. Tell us what you like or don’t like about the workloads. Are there other use cases you’d like to see?

Now that we have three benchmarks, the old HDXPRT-centric model of the community needs updating. Earlier this week, a message went out to the community announcing that we will be reorganizing the benchmarks under the umbrella of BenchmarkXPRT. This reorganization will touch all aspects of the community, from the Web site to Facebook, Twitter, and even the memberships themselves. We’ll be rolling out these changes over the next few weeks, and we’ll keep you informed every step of the way.

Eric

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Posted in BenchmarkXPRT, HTML5, Let us know your thoughts, Web-based testing, WebXPRT |

TouchXPRT Web test update

By Bill Catchings

on November 29, 2012

On October 22, we released TouchXPRT CP1 to the community. We took the unprecedented step of releasing CP1 without any restrictions on publishing results, and since then reviews of the Microsoft Slate and the Sony Duo 11 Convertible Laptop have used TouchXPRT.

The five scenarios in CP1 focus on media manipulation. While this is an important activity on touch devices, we know this is not all people do.

Next week, we plan to release Web-based scenarios. They use HTML 5 for a variety of activities. Unlike the original scenarios in TouchXPRT CP1, there will be nothing to download. You simply browse to a URL and run the tests online. There’s nothing to set up, just browse and run.

That means that there is nothing preventing you from running these tests on pretty much any system-browser combination that supports HTML5, not just on touch-based, Windows 8 devices like the rest of TouchXPRT. That started us wondering whether these Web-based activities should be thought of as a different benchmark entirely. When these tests are available, please try them out and let us know what you think. Do you think they are worthwhile for a broader range of devices? Do you think their scenario-based emphasis is a good alternative to existing lower-level Web-based tests?

Please keep in mind that it’s not too late to give feedback on TouchXPRT CP1. Let us know how you like the scenarios on CP1 as well as what other activities you would like to see.

-Bill Catchings

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Posted in Benchmarking, HTML5, Performance testing on tablets, Touch-based benchmarking, Touch-based devices, TouchXPRT, Web-based testing |

Category: WebXPRT

Some good questions

Busy start to a new year

Ending the year with a bang!

The newest member of the family

TouchXPRT Web test update

Check out the other XPRTs: