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Category: CES

Golden tickets

Bill Catchings
By Bill Catchings
on January 9, 2014

We (Bill and Mark) are on our way home from CES. There were lots of cool things to see, from electric cars to health and fitness wearables to all manner of mobile devices. And, more, a whole lot more.

We enjoyed seeing many of those products, but that was not our primary mission at the show. Our main goal was to spread the word about the XPRT benchmarks. We did that by visiting multiple mobile-device members and giving out to many of them a very special golden ticket. Yes, we’re talking a physical, Willy Wonka-style golden ticket. The two-sided tickets look really cool.

One side invites folks to be heard by joining the BenchmarkXPRT community. The other offers them the opportunity to have PT test devices for free with all the applicable XPRT benchmarks. All a vendor has to do to get this free testing is send the device to PT. We hope to get many devices in-house and to provide a great many results on our Web sites.

We wore the new BenchmarkXPRT shirts as we walked the floor.

We will soon be sending one shirt—and one golden ticket—to each member of the community. Please make sure we have your latest mailing address so we can ship those to you.

-Bill & Mark

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Posted in BenchmarkXPRT development community, CES, Future of performance evaluation, Performance benchmarking, Principled Technologies |

Happy New Year everyone!

Eric Hale
By Eric Hale
on January 2, 2014

We hope you had a great holiday.

Bill and Mark are preparing to go to CES this year. We’re really excited about the chance to talk with folks because there’s so much to talk about.

It’s been a great year for the XPRTs. At the start of 2013, HDXPRT 2012 was the only XPRT benchmark available to the public. Now four XPRT benchmarks are available through our Web site. Take a look at some of the milestones from this banner year:

  • We released MobileXPRT 2013, TouchXPRT 2013 and WebXPRT 2013 to the public.
  • To reflect the expanded offerings, the HDXPRT Development Community evolved into the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community.
  • We radically redesigned the Web site.
  • The greater XPRT offerings let us test more varied devices, including the Amazon Kindle Fire HDX, Barnes & Noble Nook HD+, NVIDIA Shield, XBOX ONE, and PS4.
  • We released four videos.

And 2014 is going to be an even bigger year! We are very close to releasing the TouchXPRT 2014 community preview and are in the comment period for a new battery life test—and we are only two days into the year!

If you will be at CES, this is a great time make yourself heard. E-mail benchmarkxprtsupport@principledtechnologies.com if you’d like to chat with Bill and Mark about what you’d like to see in the coming year.

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Posted in BenchmarkXPRT development community, CES, MobileXPRT, TouchXPRT, WebXPRT |

Some good questions

Eric Hale
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 |

Unchecked ambition

Bill Catchings
By Bill Catchings
on January 17, 2013

With 10 applications and five scenarios, HDXPRT 2012 is the most ambitious version of HDXPRT ever. However, as we said in the blog post of the same name, There is such a thing as too much. We heard that message from you as well: HDXPRT 2012 is too big. At 11 GB, we can’t make it available for download, and it won’t fit on a single DVD.

It also takes longer to use than many of you would like. The installation takes a couple of hours, and each iteration takes 2 to 3 hours. Because a valid run of HDXPRT 2012 comprises three iterations, getting a single result takes all day.

As we work to reduce the size of HDXPRT 2013, we’re being careful. While we need to shrink the benchmark and its running time, we want to be sure that we don’t compromise its essential value. As part of this process, we’re looking at both the selection of applications and the ways we can reengineer the scenarios.

If you have ideas about HDXPRT 2012 that you haven’t sent yet, now is a good time to do that. We’ll be sending out the HDXPRT 2013 RFC in the next couple of weeks. Once it’s out, we will look forward to hearing your comments.

I also wanted to mention that as we had to cancel CES at the last minute, we’re planning to do a Webinar next week (Tuesday, January 22) to cover the material we planned to present there. We’ll send out an email later this week with more details.

Bill

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Posted in BenchmarkXPRT, CES, HDXPRT, HDXPRT 2013, HDXPRT Development Community benefits, Let us know your thoughts |

Busy start to a new year

Eric Hale
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.

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 |

There is such a thing as too much

Eric Hale
By Eric Hale
on December 6, 2012

There’s been a lot of excitement about TouchXPRT recently. However, we haven’t been ignoring HDXPRT. On November 9, we released a patch that lets HDXPRT support Windows 8. We’ve now integrated the patch into HDXPRT2012, so all copies of HDXPRT 2012 going forward will install on Windows 8 without the need for a separate step.

As promised, we will be releasing the source code for HDXPRT 2012. We anticipate having it available for community members by December 14.

During the comment period for HDXPRT, this message came through loud and clear: HDXPRT 2012 is too big and takes too long to run. So we are working hard to find the best way to reduce the number of applications and scenarios. While we want to make the benchmark smaller and faster, we want to make sure that HDXPRT 2013 is comprehensive enough to provide useful performance metrics for the greatest number of people.

We’re working toward having an RFC in late January that will define a leaner, meaner HDXPRT 2013, and will reflect the other comments we have as received as well.  If you have thoughts about which applications and scenarios are most important to you, please let us know.

In other news, CES is coming in January, and Principled Technologies will be there! Once again, Bill is hoping to meet with as many of you in the Development Community as possible. We’ll have a suite at the Hilton and would love for you to come, kick back, and talk about HDXPRT, TouchXPRT, the future of benchmarks, or about the cool things you’ve seen at the show. (Bill loves talking about gadgets. Last year, he went into gadget overload!)

If you plan to be at CES, but are stuck working a booth or suite, let us know and Bill will try to stop by and say hi. Drop us an email at hdxrpt_CES@principledtechnologies.com and we will set up an appointment.

Finally, we’re really excited about the big changes at the Principled Technologies Web site. The new Web site gives us a lot of opportunities. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be looking at ways the Development Community can take advantage of them.

Eric

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Posted in Application-based benchmarks, Benchmarking, CES, Collaborative benchmark development, HDXPRT 2013, HDXPRT Development Community benefits, Principled Technologies, What makes a good benchmark?, Windows 8 | Tagged |

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