Category: WebXPRT

No time to rest

on March 7, 2013

Last week was possibly our biggest week ever. We announced PhoneXPRT, a new benchmark for evaluating the performance of smartphones, and released TouchXPRT 2013 and WebXPRT 2013 to the general public.

Since then, there’s been a lot of interest. The numbers keep going up! We’re not just talking about page views – people are downloading TouchXPRT and lots of people are running WebXPRT.

People have also been downloading the TouchXPRT source, which is very exciting. We strongly encourage community members to look at how the benchmark is put together. If you have programming skills and want to submit code, get in touch with us at benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechologies.com. We’d love to hear from you!

Oh, and there’s a new video! This one introduces WebXPRT to the public. It gives a good idea of the range of devices WebXPRT will run on.

That’s a lot for one week. We’re not resting on our laurels, though. Obviously, we’re working on PhoneXPRT. However, let’s not forget about HDXPRT. The comment period for HDXPRT 2013 officially closed on March 6 and we are starting to work on the HDXPRT 2013 design document. If you have any feedback you haven’t sent, please do send it on. We’ll do our best to incorporate it into the design document.

Eric

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Posted in HDXPRT 2013, HDXPRT 2013 RFC, PhoneXPRT, TouchXPRT 2013 release, TouchXPRT 2013 source, Video, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 2013 release |

What a week!

By Eric Hale

on February 28, 2013

This has been quite a week for the BenchmarkXPRT family. We kicked off the week by announcing a new benchmark: PhoneXPRT. PhoneXPRT is designed to test small form factor devices, such as smart phones. PhoneXPRT will initially run on Android. For more information, read the press release at http://www.prweb.com/releases/phoneXPRT/pt0213/prweb10461639.htm

There was more to come. Today we formally released TouchXPRT 2013 and WebXPRT 2013. The community and the media have been using these as community previews for weeks now. Now that we’ve released the benchmarks, anyone may freely use them. You can read the press release at http://www.prweb.com/releases/TouchXPRTWebXPRT/0213/prweb10474803.htm

We have also released the TouchXPRT 2013 source to the community. The instructions for building the benchmark are the same as for building the community preview. Remember that community members have access to the source, but it is not available to the general public.

As WebXPRT 2013 moves from being a community preview to a public release, people may have concerns about privacy. While anyone using WebXPRT 2013 agrees to share their results, the database does not store any identifying information.

Remember, the HDXPRT comment period is still open! Please send your comments in. If you’ve not read the RFC yet, you can find it at http://www.principledtechnologies.com/hdxprt/forum/hdxprt2013RFC.php.

Eric

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Posted in PhoneXPRT, TouchXPRT 2013 release, TouchXPRT 2013 source, WebXPRT 2013 release, WebXPRT 2013 results |

Going Live

By Bill Catchings

on February 21, 2013

As you may know, the Mobile World Congress (MWC) starts Monday in Barcelona. I really hate that I can’t go to this show and not only because I love Barcelona!

However, MWC seems like a good time to release TouchXPRT 2013 and WebXPRT 2013. We’re testing the final builds now, and plan to make them available to the public next week. If you’re not a community member and want to see what all the fuss is about before then, please join the community and check them out.

As we discussed in the Webinar back in January, we have been able to verify that the results from both benchmarks are in line with those of the community previews. That means that we don’t anticipate any problems comparing results from the CP1 versions with those from the release versions.

While TouchXPRT 2013 CP1 did not have a total score, based on your feedback, we added one in final version of TouchXPRT 2013.

I’ve included some comparison results from WebXPRT 2013 at the end of this post. As always, we would love to have any results you can share for either benchmark.

We’ve also been thinking about where to go next. We’re not ready to talk yet, but expect big news next week!

Bill

Device	WebXPRT 2013 Overall score
Nexus 7	201
Kindle Fire	95
iPad 2	52
iPad 4	181
Samsung Galaxy SIII	168
iPhone 5	167
iPad Mini	110

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Posted in TouchXPRT 2013 release, Trade Shows, WebXPRT 2013 release, Windows 8 |

Some good questions

By Eric Hale

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 |

Category: WebXPRT

No time to rest

What a week!

Going Live

Some good questions

Busy start to a new year

Ending the year with a bang!

Check out the other XPRTs: