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Category: Trade Shows

IDF16 Shenzhen

Bill Catchings
By Bill Catchings
on April 14, 2016

I just spent the last couple of days at IDF16 Shenzhen. It was a great opportunity to talk to folks about the XPRTs, see some future technology demos, and think about the future of the XPRTs.

The technology and product demos included lots of interesting technology. I saw everything from the latest computers to games to VR to body monitoring.

IDF16-1

Of particular interest to me were the future-looking technologies beyond the usual array of notebooks, tablets, and servers. I was able to see drones that could video a person by following them, while avoiding obstacles such as trees. I saw a number of demos using the Oculus Rift. I got to see some robot demos that were impressive in their use of the fairly off-the-shelf technology driving them. I would have had myself scanned and then had a small 3D model of myself printed, but I was pressed for time and the line was too long.

I was particularly interested in a mirror that could scan a person and tell things about their health. I also found somewhat amusing a technology demo that was able to “beautify” a person in real time for use with teleconferencing such as Skype. While I might quibble about the definition of beautify, the idea of real-time video enhancement is intriguing. (Given the raw material I gave it to work with, it was no easy task to accomplish!) Maybe I won’t need to shave before my next WebEx meeting…

IDF16-2

All of these technologies give some hints as to areas the XPRTs may go in the future. While I don’t think we are quite ready for BeautificationXPRT, there may well be some workloads we should consider such as path finding, real-time video enhancement, health monitoring, virtual reality, and gaming. Please let us know your thoughts about what near-term technologies we should be considering in future workloads.

We definitely have exciting times still ahead of us in technology and the XPRTs!

Bill

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT development community, Future of performance evaluation, IDF, Internet of things, IoT, Mobile devices, Performance of computing devices, Virtual reality |

Quarterly review

Eric Hale
By Eric Hale
on March 31, 2016

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

Posted in AnandTech, BenchmarkXPRT, Brett Howse, CES, Collaborative benchmark development, Community Preview, Dell, Mobile World Congress, Mobile World Congress, Nebula Wolf, North Carolina State University, Patrick Chang, TouchXPRT, TouchXPRT 2016, XPRT Women Code-a-Thon |

Is it hot in here?

Eric Hale
By Eric Hale
on March 3, 2016

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.

Posted in Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, CES, Collaborative benchmark development, Dell, Future of performance evaluation, Patrick Chang, Performance benchmarking, Power consumption, Temperature, TouchXPRT, Trade Shows, What makes a good benchmark? |

Mobile World Congress 2016 and the need for more

Mark Van Name
By Mark Van Name
on February 25, 2016

Nothing shows you how much more bandwidth we need than a techie trade show like Mobile World Congress 2016. No matter how much the show’s organizers made available, the attendees swamped it with data from their many devices—phones, tablets, and PCs.

This show also demonstrated that we’re going to need a lot more of something else: device performance.

Some people like to say that our current devices are fast enough, but those people either weren’t at MWC or weren’t paying attention. New, demanding workloads were on display everywhere. High-end graphics. Support for an ever-growing range of wearables. Virtual reality. Augmented reality. The ability to act as a hub for all sorts of home automation devices. These and other new capabilities place ever-increasing demands on devices—and they’re all just getting started.

As I walked all of the MWC buildings—and I did at least walk by every single exhibit—I was struck again and again by how many cool technologies are on the cusp of being ready for prime time. They’ll bring nifty features to our everyday lives, and they’ll place heavy demands on our devices to support them and enable them to run well.

Some devices will handle these demands better than others, but we won’t be able to tell the winners from the losers just by looking at them. We’ll need reliable, relevant, real-world benchmarks to sort the winners from the posers—and that means we’ll need the XPRTs.  We’ll need the XPRTs we have today, and we’ll need new XPRTs and/or new XPRT workloads for the future. We’ll need help from everyone—members of the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community and vendors yet to join it—to create these new tools, so that buyers everywhere can make smart purchase decisions.

It’s an exciting time. The future for tech, for devices, and for the XPRTs is bright.  Let’s get busy creating it.

Posted in BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Future of performance evaluation, Internet of things, IoT, Mobile devices, Mobile World Congress, PCs, Performance benchmarking, Trade Shows |

There’s a lot going on!

Eric Hale
By Eric Hale
on February 11, 2016

We recently released TouchXPRT 2016 CP3 to the community. Testing has been going well, so we are releasing TouchXPRT 2016 to the general public on Monday. Thanks to everyone who tried out the previews!

Back in December, we told you about Nebula Wolf, a game-based workload developed by students at North Carolina State University. Now we have a new video that talks about the project and why efforts such as this one matter for the XPRTs. It’s a gorgeous video. I think it’s one of our best!

We’ve also created a page that talks about the Nebula Wolf project. And, of course, the page has links for the community members to see the game in action and check out the source code. If you’re not a member, it’s easy to join!

Our next community outreach effort will be the XPRT Women Code-a-Thon March 12-13 in Seattle. It’s a great chance to contribute to the XPRTs, hang with other coders, and maybe even win some prize money!

Later this month, Mark will be at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. If you’d like to chat with him, just let us know.

Finally, the XPRT Weekly Tech Spotlight shines on the Google Pixel C this week.

That’s a lot, and there’s more to come!

Eric

Posted in Mobile World Congress, Nebula Wolf, North Carolina State University, TouchXPRT, TouchXPRT 2016, TouchXPRT development process, TouchXPRT release cycle, XPRT Weekly Tech Spotlight, XPRT Women Code-a-Thon |

Comparing apples and oranges?

Eric Hale
By Eric Hale
on February 4, 2016

My first day at CES, I had breakfast with Brett Howse from AnandTech. It was a great opportunity to get the perspective of a savvy tech journalist and frequent user of the XPRTs.

During our conversation, Brett raised concerns about comparing mobile devices to PCs. As mobile devices get more powerful, the performance and capability gaps between them and PCs are narrowing. That makes it more common to compare upper-end mobile devices to PCs.

People have long used different versions of benchmarks when comparing these two classes of devices. For example, the images for benchmarking a phone might be smaller than those for benchmarking a PC. Also, because of processor differences, the benchmarks might be built differently, say a 16- or 32-bit executable for a mobile device, and a 64-bit version for a PC. That was fine when no one was comparing the devices directly, but can be a problem now.

This issue is more complicated than it sounds. For those cases where a benchmark uses a dumbed-down version of the workload for mobile devices, comparing the results is clearly not valid. However, let’s assume that the workload stays the same, and that you run a 32-bit benchmark on a tablet, and a 64-bit version on a PC. Is the comparison valid? It may be, if you are talking about the day-to-day performance a user is likely to encounter. However, it may not be valid if you are making statement about the potential performance of the device itself.

Brett would like the benchmarking community to take charge of this issue and provide guidance about how to compare mobile devices and PCs. What are your thoughts?

Eric

Posted in AnandTech, BenchmarkXPRT development community, Brett Howse, CES, Collaborative benchmark development, Future of performance evaluation, Mobile devices, PCs, Performance of computing devices, Performance testing on tablets, What makes a good benchmark? |

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