This November will
mark the tenth anniversary of the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, which we
originally called the HDXPRT Development Community. Since the early days of HDXPRT, our community has grown to include about 275 members from over
85 companies and organizations, and we’ve added seven benchmarks to the XPRT family.
We initially mailed HDXPRT DVDs to testers interested in a new way to evaluate
PC performance, and now thousands of users around the world download our
benchmarks and rely on them to help measure the performance of everything from
tablets to laptops to high-end datacenter hardware.
As the XPRTs continue
to grow and evolve, we’ve worked to make sure that the resources that we
offer—and the ways we offer them—continue to meet the needs of XPRT testers and
community members. As we expand in the AI and datacenter spaces with AIXPRT and CloudXPRT, our user group is
becoming larger and more diverse than ever. We have already made some changes to
better serve this expanding group, and will be making additional changes over
the months ahead.
The first set of
changes relate to our community membership model. Originally, membership in the
BenchmarkXPRT Development Community required a $20 fee and provided access to
preview versions of new benchmarks, the ability to submit ideas for future
benchmarks, and regular updates through our monthly newsletter and community
announcements. To remove the financial obstacle to joining, we introduced a fee
waiver process a few years ago.
Also, we know that some
OEM employees and members of the tech press are interested in the XPRTs, but are
unable to join the community for one reason or another. With these people in
mind, we recently experimented with making the CloudXPRT Preview publicly
available. Releasing preview builds to all who are interested makes it more
likely that users will incorporate the XPRTs into their test suites, and we
have decided to adopt this practice for other benchmarks going forward.
In the coming months,
we’ll be updating parts of our website to increase access to XPRT content. For
example, certain content such as source code for most of the XPRTs is currently
available only to members. We plan to remove the login requirement for access
to this material.
Please keep in mind
that membership in the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community continues to offer
exclusive opportunities. Members can join groups such as the CloudXPRT Results
Review Group and offer direct input into the design of future benchmarks.
Members also receive our monthly newsletters.
If you have any
questions about the XPRTs or community membership, please feel free to ask!
Justin
