We’re excited to announce that the CrXPRT 2 Community Preview (CP) is now available! BenchmarkXPRT Development Community members can access the preview using a direct link posted on the CrXPRT tab in the XPRT Members’ Area (login required), where they will also find the CrXPRT 2 CP user manual.
You can find more information about the key differences between CrXPRT 2015 and CrXPRT 2 in last week’s blog entry. During the preview period, we allow testers to publish CP test scores, but CrXPRT 2 overall performance test scores and battery life measurements are not comparable to CrXPRT 2015 scores.
If you have any questions about CrXPRT 2 or joining the community, please let us know!
As we get
closer to the CrXPRT 2 Community Preview (CP), we want to provide readers with
a glimpse of the new CrXPRT 2 UI. In line with the functional and aesthetic themes
we used for the latest versions of WebXPRT, MobileXPRT, and HDXPRT, we’re
implementing a clean, bright look with a focus on intuitive navigation. The
screenshots below show how we’ve used that approach to rework the home, battery
life test, performance test, and battery life test results screens. (We’re
still tweaking the UI, so the screens you see in the CP may differ slightly.)
On the home screen, we kept the performance test and battery life test buttons, but made it clearer that you can choose only one. We also added a link to the user manual to the bottom ribbon for quick access.
If you choose to run a battery life test and click Next, the screen below appears. The CrXPRT 2 battery life test requires a full rundown, so you’ll need charge your device to 100 percent before you can start the test. Once you’ve done that, enter a name for the test run, unplug the system, and click Start. (Note that you no longer need to enter values for screen brightness and audio levels.)
The CrXPRT 2 performance test includes updated versions of six of the seven workloads in CrXPRT 2015. (As we discussed in a previous blog post, newer versions of Chrome can’t run the Photo Collage workload without a workaround, so we removed it from CrXPRT 2.) To run the performance test, enter a name for the test run, customize the workloads if you wish, and click Start.
For the results screens, we wanted to highlight the most important end-of-test information while still offering clear paths for options such as getting additional details on the test, submitting results, and running the test again. Below, we show the results screen from a battery life test. Note the “Main menu” link in the upper-left corner, which we added to all screens to give users a quick way to navigate back to the home screen.
CrXPRT 2 development
and testing are still underway. We don’t yet have an exact release date for the
CP, but once we do, we’ll announce it here in the blog.
What do you
think about the new CrXPRT 2 UI? Let us know!
AIXPRT Community Preview 2 (CP2) has been generating quite a bit of interest among the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community and members of the tech press. We’re excited that the tool has piqued curiosity and that folks are recognizing its value for technical analysis. When talking with folks about test setup and configuration, we keep hearing the same questions:
How do I find the exact toolkit or package that I need?
How do I find the instructions for a specific toolkit?
What test configuration variables are most important for producing consistent, relevant results?
How do I know which values to choose when configuring options such as iterations, concurrent instances, and batch size?
In the coming weeks, we’ll be working to provide detailed answers to questions about test configuration. In response to the confusion about finding specific packages and instructions, we’ve redesigned the CP2 download page to make it easier for you to find what you need. Below, we show a snapshot from the new CP2 download table. Instead of having to download the entire CP2 package that includes the OpenVINO, TensorFlow, and TensorRT in TensorFlow test packages, you can now download one package at a time. In the Documentation column, we’ve posted package-specific instructions, so you won’t have to wade through the entire installation guide to find the instructions you need.
We hope these changes make it easier for people to experiment with AIXPRT. As always, please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments you may have.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve gotten great feedback about the kinds of data points people are looking for in AIXPRT results, as well as suggestions for how to improve the AIXPRT results viewer. To make it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for, we’ve made a number of changes:
You can now filter results in categories such as framework, target hardware, batch size, and precision, and can designate minimum throughput and maximum latency scores. When you select a value from a drop-down menu or enter text, the results change immediately to reflect the filter.
You can search for variables such as processor vendor or processor speed.
The viewer displays eight results per page by default and lets you change this to 16, 48, or Show all.
The following features of the viewer, which have been present previously, can help you to navigate more efficiently:
Click the tabs at the top of the table to switch from ResNet-50 network results to SSD-MobileNet network results.
Click the header of any column to sort the data on that variable. One click sorts A-Z and two clicks sort Z-A.
Click the link in the Source column to visit a detailed page on that result. The page contains additional test configuration and system hardware information and lets you download results files.
We hope these changes will improve the utility of the results table. We’ll continue to add features to improve the experience. If you have any suggestions, please let us know!
We released the second AIXPRT Community Preview (CP2) about two weeks ago. The main additions in CP2 were the ability to run certain test configurations in Windows (OpenVINO CPU/GPU and TensorFlow CPU), the option to download the installer package from the AIXPRT tab in the XPRT Members’ Area, and a demo mode.
We’re also investigating ways to support TensorFlow GPU and TensorFlow-TensorRT testing in Windows, and we’d like to eventually add support for TensorRT testing in Ubuntu and Windows. If development and pre-release testing go as planned, we may roll out some of these extra features by the end of June. However, it’s possible that getting all the pieces that we want in place will require a multi-step release process. If so, we’re considering two approaches: (1) issuing a third community preview (CP3) and (2) preparing a general availability (GA) release, to which we would add features over the months following the release. Neither of these paths is likely to affect test results from the currently supported configurations.
Would you like to work with another community preview, or would it be better for us to move straight to a GA release and add features as they become ready? We want to follow the approach that the majority of community members prefer, so please let us know what you think. As always, we also welcome any questions, concerns, or suggestions regarding the AIXPRT development process.
In last week’s blog, we predicted that the second AIXPRT Community Preview (CP2) would be ready for release later this month. Since then, the development process has accelerated, and we now expect to release CP2 as early as tomorrow, May 10.
Those who have access to the existing AIXPRT Community Preview GitHub repository will be able to access CP2 the same way as before. In addition to making the build available on GitHub, we’ll also post CP2 on an AIXPRT tab in the XPRT Members’ Area (login required). If you don’t have a BenchmarkXPRT Development Community membership, please contact us and we’ll help you register.
Testing with AIXPRT CP2 in Ubuntu will be the same as with the first CP, and none of the CP2 changes will affect results. In Windows, testers will be able to use OpenVINO to target a system’s CPU and GPU, and TensorFlow to target CPUs. We’re still investigating ways to support TensorFlow GPU and TensorFlow-TensorRT testing in Windows.
We’re also continuing to work on the improvements to the AIXPRT results viewer that we mentioned last week. We won’t be able to implement all of the changes by tomorrow, but rather than waiting until we’re finished, we’ll be rolling out improvements as they become ready.
We’ll continue to keep everyone up to date with AIXPRT news here in the blog. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know.
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