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The XPRTs can help with your holiday shopping!

The holiday shopping season is fast approaching, and choosing the right tech gift can often be a daunting task. If you’re considering phones, tablets, Chromebooks, or laptops as gifts, and are unsure where to get reliable device information, the XPRTs can help!

The XPRTs provide objective, reliable measures of a device’s performance that can help to cut through the marketing noise. For example, instead of guessing whether the performance of a new laptop lives up to its billing, you can use its WebXPRT performance score to see how it stacks up against the competition on everyday tasks.

A good place to start looking for device scores is our XPRT results browser, which lets you access our database of more than 3,200 test results from over 165 sources, including major tech review publications around the world, OEMs, and independent testers. You can find a wealth of current and historical performance data across all the XPRT benchmarks and hundreds of devices. Learn how to use the results browser here.

If you’re considering a popular device, chances are good that a recent tech review includes an XPRT score for it. You can find these reviews by going to your favorite tech review site and searching for “XPRT,” or entering the name of the device and the appropriate XPRT (e.g., “iPhone” and “WebXPRT”) in a search engine. Here are a few recent tech reviews that used the XPRTs to evaluate popular devices:

The XPRTs can help consumers make better-informed and more confident tech purchases this holiday season, and we hope you’ll find the data you need on our site or in an XPRT-related tech review. If you have any questions about the XPRTs, XPRT scores, or the results database please feel free to ask!

Justin

We have a new XPRTs around the world infographic!

If you’ve followed the XPRT blog for a while, you know that we occasionally update the community on some of the reach metrics we track by publishing a new version of the “XPRTs around the world” infographic. The metrics we track include completed test runs, benchmark downloads, and mentions of the XPRTs in advertisements, articles, and tech reviews. Gathering this information gives us insight into how many people are using the XPRT tools, and updating the infographic helps readers and community members see the impact the XPRTs are having around the world.

This week, we published a new infographic, which includes the following highlights:

  • The XPRTs have been mentioned more than 19,500 times on over 4,000 unique sites.
  • Those mentions include more than 12,300 articles and reviews.
  • Users have tested gear with the XPRTs in over 924 cities located in 81 countries on six continents. New cities of note include Dhaka, Bangladesh; Zagreb, Croatia; Hamilton, New Zealand; and Medina, Saudi Arabia.

In addition to the reach metrics we mention above, the XPRTs have now delivered more than 1,330,000 real-world results! We’re grateful for everyone who’s helped us get this far. Your participation is vital to our achieving our goal: to provide benchmark tools that are reliable, relevant, and easy to use.

Justin

On track for a CloudXPRT web microservices update this fall

Last month, we announced that we’re working on an updated CloudXPRT web microservices test package. The purpose of the update is to fix installation failures on Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, and ensure that the web microservices workload works on Ubuntu 22.04, using updated software components such as Kubernetes v1.23.7, Kubespray v2.18.1, and Kubernetes Metrics Server v1. The update also incorporates some additional minor script changes.

We are still testing the updated test package with on-premises hardware and Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure configurations. So far, testing is progressing well, and we feel increasingly confident that we will be able to release the updated test package soon. We would like to share a more concrete release schedule, but because of the complexity of the workload and the CSP platforms involved, we are waiting until we are certain that everything is ready to go.

The name of the updated package will be CloudXPRT v1.2, and it will include only the updated v1.2 test harness and the updated web microservices workload. It will not include the data analytics workload. As we stated in last month’s blog, we plan to publish the updated web microservices package, and see what kind of interest we receive from users about a possible refresh of the v1.1 data analytics workload. For now, the v1.1 data analytics workload will continue to be available via CloudXPRT.com for some time to serve as a reference resource for users that have worked with the package in the past.

As soon as possible, we’ll provide more information about the CloudXPRT v1.2 release date here in the blog. If you have any questions about the update or CloudXPRT in general, please feel free to contact us!

Justin

The Exploring WebXPRT 4 white paper is now available

This week, we published the Exploring WebXPRT 4 white paper. It describes the design and structure of WebXPRT 4, including detailed information about the benchmark’s harness, HTML5 and WebAssembly (WASM) capability checks, and changes we’ve made to the structure of the performance test workloads. We explain the benchmark’s scoring methodology, how to automate tests, and how to submit results for publication. The white paper also includes information about the third-party functions and libraries that WebXPRT 4 uses during the HTML5 and WASM capability checks and performance workloads.

The Exploring WebXPRT 4 white paper promotes the high level of transparency and disclosure that is a core value of the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community. We’ve always believed that transparency builds trust, and trust is essential for a healthy benchmarking community. That’s why we involve community members in the benchmark development process and disclose how we build our benchmarks and how they work.

You can find the paper on WebXPRT.com and our XPRT white papers page. If you have any questions about WebXPRT 4, please let us know, and be sure to check out our other XPRT white papers.

Justin

An update on Chrome OS support for CrXPRT

In March, we discussed the Chrome OS team’s plan to end support for Chrome apps in June and instead focus their efforts on Chrome extensions and Progressive Web Apps. After receiving feedback on their published timeline, the Chrome OS team decided to extend Chrome app support for Enterprise and Education account customers through January 2025. Because we publish our Chrome app (CrXPRT) through a private BenchmarkXPRT developer account, and because we have not seen any further updates to the support timeline, we don’t assume that the support extension will apply to CrXPRT.

Since June has come and gone, and the support extension probably does not apply to our account, we do not expect to be able to publish any future fixes or updates for CrXPRT. As of now, and up through Chrome 105, the CrXPRT 2 performance and battery life tests are still working without a hitch. We will continue to run the benchmark on a regular basis to monitor functionality, and we will disclose any future issues here in the blog and on CrXPRT.com. We hope the app will continue to run both performance and battery life tests well into the future. However, given the frequency of Chrome updates, it’s difficult for us to predict how long the benchmark will remain viable.

As we mentioned back in March, we hope to begin development of an all-new Chrome OS XPRT benchmark by the end of this year. We’ll discuss that prospect in more detail in future blog posts, but if you have ideas about the types of features or workloads you’d like to see in a new Chrome OS benchmark, please let us know!

Justin

The XPRTs: What would you like to see?

One of the core principles of the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community is a commitment to valuing the feedback of both community members and the larger group of testers that use the XPRTs on a regular basis. That feedback helps us to ensure that as the XPRTs continue to grow and evolve, the resources that we offer will continue to meet the needs of those that use them.

In the past, user feedback has influenced specific aspects of our benchmarks such as the length of test runs, user interface features, results presentation, and the removal or inclusion of specific workloads. More broadly, we have also received suggestions for entirely new XPRTs and ways we might target emerging technologies or industry use cases.

As we approach the second half of 2022 and begin planning for 2023, we’re asking to hear your ideas about new XPRTs—or new features for existing XPRTs. Are you aware of hardware form factors, software platforms, or prominent applications that are difficult or impossible to evaluate using existing performance benchmarks? Are there new technologies we should be incorporating into existing XPRTs via new workloads? Can you recommend ways to improve any of the XPRTs or XPRT-related tools such as results viewers?

We are interested in your answers to these questions and any other ideas you have, so please feel free to contact us. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Justin

Check out the other XPRTs:

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