Month: May 2011

Computex – Taipei

on May 31, 2011

It’s hot and muggy here in Taipei. Just like home in North Carolina!

Weather aside, Taipei is definitely not Raleigh. Taipei is a big city with tall buildings. Right next to the hotel is the Taipei 101 which was the world’s tallest building for a few years. The streets are full of cars and motor scooters. People here walk quickly and purposefully. All of Computex seems to be filled with similar purpose and drive. It reminds me a quite bit of COMDEX in Vegas in its prime. Technology has taken over a city only too glad to embrace that technology. In next week’s blog, I’ll let you know about some of the cool things showing here.

I’ve had some interesting HDXPRT meetings so far. One of them helped me to remember some of the non-technical challenges of a successful benchmark. We’ve mentioned benchmark challenges like reliability (it needs to run when you need it to run) and repeatability (it needs to give similar results—within a few percent—each time you run it). I discussed with folks from one PC performance Web site the importance of a benchmark having some permanence. If the benchmark changes too frequently, you can’t compare the current product with the one you reviewed a couple months ago. With HDXPRT, our goal is an annual cycle. That should allow for comparing to older results while still keeping the benchmark current.

Any folks who may be here in Taipei for Computex, please come on by the Hyatt. We can talk about HDXPRT, benchmarks in general, or what you would most like to see in the future of performance evaluation. If nothing else, come by and escape the humidity! Drop us an email at hdxprt_computex@principledtechnologies.com and set up a time to come on over.

Bill

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Posted in Benchmarks in general, HDXPRT release cycle |

HDXPRT 2011 Media Benchmark Now Available

By Eric Hale

on May 26, 2011

The HDXPRT Development Community, which Principled Technologies (PT) administers, is pleased to announce the release of the HDXPRT 2011 benchmark.

HDXPRT 2011 is a benchmark for evaluating the capabilities of PCs in consumer digital media usages.

PT will ship the release discs to all registered HDXPRT Development Community members. The public can access the benchmark via direct download from the official Community Web site, http://www.hdxprt.com.

The official global HDXPRT 2011 launch will take place in early June during Computex Taipei. Bill Catchings, CTO of PT, will lead informational seminars about the benchmark and its potential to shape the way we measure the performance of PCs manipulating consumer digital media.

Members of the HDXPRT Development Community significantly influenced the development of the benchmark by providing feedback on the initial design specifications and participating in Beta testing.

Visit the official HDXPRT Development Community Web site, http://www.hdxprt.com, to learn how you can participate in the development of future versions of HDXPRT and stay up to date on the latest information regarding the benchmark. The Community also has a presence on Facebook and Twitter.

About HDXPRT
HDXPRT, the High Definition eXperience & Performance Ratings Test, is a software tool for evaluating the capabilities of PCs at handling real-world digital media scenarios and common consumer applications. It includes tests for popular consumer usage models such as high-definition video transcoding, high dynamic range (HDR) photo manipulation, Windows 7 Drag and Drop transcoding for portable media players, and HD Flash video playback.

About Principled Technologies, Inc.
Principled Technologies, Inc. is a leading provider of technology marketing and assessment services. The founders, Mark Van Name and Bill Catchings, have worked together in technology assessment for over 25 years. As journalists, they published over a thousand articles on a wide array of technology subjects. They created and led the Ziff-Davis Benchmark Operation, which developed such industry-standard benchmarks as Ziff Davis Media’s Winstone and WebBench. They have also co-founded or led several other technology testing firms including ZD labs, eTesting Labs, and VeriTest.

Principled Technologies, Inc. is located in Durham, North Carolina, USA. For more information, please visit http://www.principledtechnologies.com.

Company Contact
Eric Hale
Principled Technologies, Inc.
1007 Slater Road
Suite 300
Durham, NC 27703
ehale@principledtechnologies.com
www.principledtechnologies.com

Waiting sucks

By Mark Van Name

on May 25, 2011

You know it does. Time is the most precious commodity, the one thing you can never get back. So when someone or something makes you wait, it sucks.

It particularly sucks when you have to wait on your PC. It’s your computer, after all, and it should do the work and be quick about it. For many tasks, it is quick, almost instantaneous. Some, though, require so much work that the computer can spend a lot of time doing them, leaving you waiting. Tasks that involve working with different types of media often fall into that category.

Which is exactly why we have HDXPRT.

It gives you a way to compare how long different PCs require to perform some common media-manipulation tasks. Because those times can be significant—sometimes many seconds, but also sometimes many minutes—HDXPRT can give you valuable information that you can factor into your PC buying plans.

After all, the faster a PC is at this sort of work, the less time you’ll spend waiting on it—and that’s a good thing.

Mark Van Name

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Posted in HDXPRT metrics, HDXPRT workloads |

Top 5 reasons for meeting us at Computex in Taipei

By Mark Van Name

on May 18, 2011

As I’ve mentioned before, Bill Catchings from PT will be at the upcoming Computex show in Taipei to debut HDXPRT 2011. At the same time, back home in North Carolina we’ll be mailing copies of the benchmark DVDs to all the members of the HDXPRT Development Community.

If you’re one of the lucky folks who gets to attend Computex, we’d love it if you would come by Bill’s room in the Hyatt (we’ll publicize the room number as soon as we know it), see the benchmark in action, and give us your thoughts about it. I know the show is huge and full of attractions, so I thought I’d give you the top five reasons you ought to make room in your schedule to visit with us.

5. Free snacks! We don’t know what they are yet, or even how we’ll persuade the hotel to let us have them, but we’re committed to providing something to quench your thirst and something to quell your hunger.

4. A break from the crowds. Not only do you get to sit, drink, eat, and see a great new benchmark, you get to do so in the quiet and luxury of a Taipei hotel suite. No more bumping shoulders with fellow show attendees or fighting to get to a place quiet enough that you can talk; in that room, you can relax.

3. You can affect the industry! The support for HDXPRT is growing. More and more organizations are using it. We don’t just want to show it to you; we want you to tell us what you think about it. Your opinions count, and they could help drive the design of the next version of the benchmark, HDXPRT 2012. Yeah, that’s right: the one in development isn’t out, and I’m already talking about the next one. Sue me: I like to live on the edge.

2. You don’t want to make Bill cry. Imagine him, sitting alone in the room, laptop humming, ready to demonstrate this cool new testing tool, and no one to keep him company. His sadness would be so unbearable that I can’t bear to think of what he might do. You can’t let that happen.

1. It’s way cooler to get your HDXPRT DVDs in person! That’s right: Bill’s not just going to show you the benchmark, he’s going to give you your very own copy! He’ll probably shake your hand, too, and thank you for coming. Admit it: that’s cooler than getting it in the mail (which is also pretty darn good—and which will happen to you if you join the HDXPRT Development Community).

Mark Van Name

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Posted in HDXPRT Development Community benefits |

What to do, what to do

By Mark Van Name

on May 11, 2011

When you set out to build an application-based benchmark like HDXPRT, you face many choices, but two are particularly important: what applications do you run, and what functions do you perform in each application?

With HDXPRT the answers were straightforward, as they should be.

The applications we chose reflected a blend of market leaders, those providing emerging but important features, and the input from our community members.

The functions we perform in each application are ones that are representative of common uses of those programs—and that reflect the input of the community.

What’s so important here is the last clause of each of those paragraphs: your input defines this benchmark.

As we finish off HDXPRT 2011 and then move to the 2012 version, we’ll begin the development cycle anew. When we do, if you want to make sure we choose the applications and functions that matter most to you, then participate, tell us what you want, let us hear your voice. We will respond to all input, so though we can’t guarantee to accept all direction—after all, goals and desires sometimes conflict—we can guarantee that you will hear back from us and that we will explain the rationale for our decisions.

Mark Van Name

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Posted in Collaborative benchmark development, HDXPRT 2012, HDXPRT development process |

Putting HDXPRT in some benchmark context

By Mark Van Name

on May 6, 2011

Benchmarks come in many shapes and sizes. Some are extremely small, simple, and focused, while others are large, complex, and cover many aspects of a system. To help position HDXPRT in the world of benchmarks, let me share with you a little taxonomy that Bill and I have long used. No taxonomy is perfect, of course, but we’ve found this one to be very helpful as a general categorization tool.

From the perspective of how benchmarks measure performance, you can divide most of them into three groups.

Inspection tools use highly specialized tests to target very particular parts of a system. Back in the day, lo these many decades ago—okay, it was only two decades, but in dog years two tech decades is like five generations—some groups used a simple no-op loop to measure processor performance. I know, it sounds dumb today, but for a short time many felt it was a legitimate measure of processor clock speed, which is one aspect of performance. Similarly, if you want to know how fast a graphics subsystem could draw a particular kind of line, you could write code to draw lines of that type over and over.

These tools have very limited utility, because they don’t do what real users do, but for people working close to hardware, they can be useful.

Moving closer to the real world, synthetic benchmarks are specially written programs that simulate the kinds of work their developers believe real users are doing. So, if you think your target users are spending all day in email, you could write your own mini email client and time functions in it. These tools definitely move closer to real user work than inspection tools, but they still have the drawback of not actually running the programs real people are using.

Application-based benchmarks take that last step by using real applications, the same programs that users employ in the real world. These benchmarks cause those applications to perform the kinds of actions that real users take, and they time those actions. You can always argue about how representative they are—more on that in a future blog entry, assuming I don’t forget to write it—but they are definitely closer to the real world because they’re using real applications.

With all of that background, HDXPRT becomes easy to classify: it’s an application-based benchmark.

Mark Van Name

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Posted in Application-based benchmarks, Benchmarks in general, History of benchmarking, Performance benchmarking |

Month: May 2011

Computex – Taipei

HDXPRT 2011 Media Benchmark Now Available

The HDXPRT Development Community, which Principled Technologies (PT) administers, is pleased to announce the release of the HDXPRT 2011 benchmark.

Waiting sucks

Top 5 reasons for meeting us at Computex in Taipei

What to do, what to do

Putting HDXPRT in some benchmark context

Check out the other XPRTs: