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Category: TouchXPRT

Open source?

We’re proud of the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community and its accomplishments over the last five years. We’re also thankful for the contributions the members of the community have made. One of the benefits of membership is access to the source code for all the XPRT performance tools. This has meant that the code is available to anyone willing to take the easy step of joining the community.

Behind our decision to use this model rather than a more traditional, open-source model was the need to control derivative works. The license agreement for the source allows members to modify the source, but not to claim that the results from that derivative code are XPRT results. For example, as a member, you may download the TouchXPRT source and modify the workloads for your specific purposes, but you can’t refer to the results as TouchXPRT results.

After much thought and discussion, we have come to believe that we can protect the benchmarks’ reputation within a traditional, open-source framework. While our original concerns are still valid, we think that the success and stature of the XPRTs is such that we can make it available via open source.

However, before we take this step, we want to hear the thoughts, concerns, and opinions of both our community members and the wider public.

Please note that if we do make the code open source, the other benefits of being a member—access to requests for comment, design documents, and community previews—will not change.

Please let us know that you think. Email us or contact us on Twitter.

Bill

Getting it right

Back in April Bill announced that we are working on a cross-platform benchmark. We asked for your thoughts and comments, and you’ve been great! We really appreciate all the great ideas.

We’ve been using code from MobileXPRT and TouchXPRT as the basis for some experiments. In his post, Bill talked about the difficulty of porting applications. However, even though we have expertise in porting applications, it’s proving more difficult than we originally thought. Benchmarks are held to a higher standard than most applications. It’s not enough for the code to run reliably and efficiently, it must compare the different platforms fairly.

One thing we know for sure: getting it right is going to take a while. However, we owe it to you to make sure that the benchmark is reliable and fair on all platforms it supports. We will, of course, keep you informed as things progress.

In the meantime, keep sending your ideas!
Eric

TouchXPRT 2016 source code is available

We’re excited to announce that the TouchXPRT 2016 source code is now available to community members!

Download the TouchXPRT 2016 source here (login required).

Download the TouchXPRT 2016 build instructions here (login required).

We also posted links to both items on the TouchXPRT tab in the Members’ Area.

If you would like more information, please contact BenchmarkXPRTsupport@principledtechnologies.com.

 

Quarterly review

It’s been one of our busiest quarters ever! Here’s a quick review of what’s been happening:

The XPRTs were on the road a lot!

 
While I was at CES, I was lucky enough to be able to sit down and talk on-the-record with a couple of community members:

 
Many thanks to them for being so generous with their time and their insights.

We also gave folks a lot to look at:

 
That is a great start to the year, but we’re going to top it – Next week, we’ll kick off Q2 with one of our biggest announcements ever!

Eric

BenchmarkXPRT Development Community releases the “Exploring TouchXPRT 2016” white paper

Durham, NC, March 28 – The BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, administered by Principled Technologies (PT), is pleased to announce the release of the “Exploring TouchXPRT 2016” white paper. The white paper discusses the details of the TouchXPRT 2016 benchmark, including the development process, new features, descriptions of its component tests and workloads, and how the benchmark calculates individual workload and overall scores. The paper also shows how to submit test results and automate testing.

Interested parties can download the white paper at www.BenchmarkXPRT.com/whitepapers.

To learn more about TouchXPRT and download the benchmark, please visit TouchXPRT.com.

To learn more about and join the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community, go to www.BenchmarkXPRT.com.

About Principled Technologies, Inc.
Principled Technologies, Inc. is a leading provider of technology marketing and learning & development services.

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

Company Contact
Eric Hale
Principled Technologies, Inc.
1007 Slater Road, Suite #300
Durham, NC 27703

Is it hot in here?

One of the great meetings I had at CES was with another community member, Patrick Chang, Senior System Engineer in the Tablet Performance group at Dell.  I was glad to hear that, when he tests his devices, Patrick makes frequent use of TouchXPRT.

While TouchXPRT stresses the system appropriately, Patrick’s job requires him to understand not only how well the device performs, but why it performs that way. He was wondering what we could do to help him correlate the temperature, power consumption, and performance of a device.

That information is not typically available to software and apps like the XPRTs. However, it may be possible to add some hooks that would let the XPRTs coordinate with third-party utilities and hardware that do.

As always, the input from the community guides the design of the XPRTs. So, we’d love to know how much interest the community has in having this type of information. If you have thoughts about this, or other kinds of information you’d like the XPRTs to gather, please let us know!

Eric

Last week in the XPRTs
We published the XPRT Weekly Tech Spotlight on the Apple iPad Pro.
We added one new BatteryXPRT ’14 result.
We added one new CrXPRT ’15 result.
We added one new MobileXPRT ’13 result.
We added four new WebXPRT ’15 results.

Check out the other XPRTs:

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