BenchmarkXPRT Blog banner

Tag Archives: XPRTs

More than two million XPRT benchmark runs and downloads!

As we near the end of 2024, we’re excited to share that the XPRTs have passed another notable milestone—over 2,000,000 combined runs and downloads! The rate of growth in the total number of XPRT runs and downloads is exciting. It took about seven and a half years for the XPRTs to pass one million total runs and downloads—but it’s taken less than half that, three and a half years, to add another million. Figure 1 shows the climb to the two-million-run mark.

Figure 1: The cumulative number of total yearly XPRT runs and downloads over time.

As you would expect, most of the runs contributing to that total come from WebXPRT tests. If you’ve run WebXPRT in any of the 983 cities and 84 countries from which we’ve received completed test data—including newcomers El Salvador, Malaysia, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia—we’re grateful for your help in reaching this milestone! As Figure 2 illustrates, WebXPRT use has grown steadily since the debut of WebXPRT 2013. On average, we now record more than twice as many WebXPRT runs each month than we recorded in WebXPRT’s entire first year. With over 340,000 runs so far in 2024—an increase of more than 16 percent over last year’s total—that growth is showing no signs of slowing down.

Figure 2: The cumulative number of total yearly WebXPRT runs over time.

This milestone isn’t just about numbers. Establishing and maintaining a presence in the industry and experiencing year-over-year growth requires more than technical know-how and marketing efforts. It requires the ongoing trust and support of the benchmarking community—including OEM labs, the tech press, and independent computer enthusiasts—and those who simply want to know how good their devices are at web browsing.

Once again, we’re thankful for the support of everyone who’s used the XPRTs over the years, and we look forward to another million!

If you have any questions or comments about any of the XPRTs, we’d love to hear from you!

Justin

Gain a deeper understanding of WebXPRT 4 with our results calculation white paper

More people around the world are using WebXPRT 4 now than ever before. It’s exciting to see that growth, which also means that many people are visiting our site and learning about the XPRTs for the first time. Because new visitors may not know how the XPRT family of benchmarks differs from other benchmarking efforts, we occasionally like to revisit the core values of our open development community here in the blog—and show how those values translate into more free resources for you.

One of our primary values is transparency in all our benchmark development and testing processes. We share information about our progress with XPRT users throughout the development process, and we invite people to contribute ideas and feedback along the way. We also publish both the source code of our benchmarks and detailed information about how they work, unlike benchmarks that use a “black box” model.

For WebXPRT 4 users who are interested in knowing more about the nuts and bolts of the benchmark, we offer several information-packed resources, including our focus for today, the WebXPRT 4 results calculation and confidence interval white paper. The white paper explains the WebXPRT 4 confidence interval, how it differs from typical benchmark variability, and the formulas the benchmark uses to calculate the individual workload scenario scores and overall score on the end-of-test results screen. The paper also provides an overview of the statistical methodology that WebXPRT uses to translate raw timings into scores.

In addition to the white paper’s discussion of the results calculation process, we’ve also provided a results calculation spreadsheet that shows the raw data from a sample test run and reproduces the calculations WebXPRT uses to generate both the workload scores and an overall score.

In potential future versions of WebXPRT, it’s likely that we’ll continue to use the same—or very similar—statistical methodologies and results calculation formulas that we’ve documented in the results calculation white paper and spreadsheet. That said, if you have suggestions for how we could improve those methods or formulas—either in part or in whole—please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’re interested in hearing your ideas!

The white paper is available on WebXPRT.com and on our XPRT white papers page. If you have any questions about the paper or spreadsheet, WebXPRT, or the XPRTs in general, please let us know.

Justin

Shopping for back-to-school tech? The XPRTs can help!

For many students, the first day of school is just around the corner, and it’s now time to shop for new tech devices that can help set them up for success in the coming year. The tech marketplace can be confusing, however, with so many brands, options, and competing claims to sort through.

Fortunately, the XPRTs are here to help!

Whether you’re shopping for a new phone, tablet, Chromebook, laptop, or desktop, the XPRTs can provide industry-trusted performance scores that can give you confidence that you’re making a smart purchasing decision.

The WebXPRT 4 results viewer is a good place to start looking for device scores. The viewer displays WebXPRT 4 scores from over 700 devices—including many of the latest releases—and we’re adding new scores all the time. To learn more about the viewer’s capabilities and how you can use it to compare devices, check out this blog post.

Another resource we offer is the XPRT results browser. The browser is the most efficient way to access the XPRT results database, which currently holds more than 3,700 test results from over 150 sources, including major tech review publications around the world, manufacturers, and independent testers. It offers a wealth of current and historical performance data across all the XPRT benchmarks and hundreds of devices. You can read more about how to use the results browser here.

Also, if you’re considering a popular device, there’s a good chance that a recent tech review includes an XPRT score for that device. There are two quick ways to find these reviews: You can either (1) search for “XPRT” on your preferred tech review site or (2) use a search engine and input the device name and XPRT name, such as “Dell XPS” and “WebXPRT.”

Here are a few recent tech reviews that use one of the XPRTs to evaluate a popular device:

Lastly, here at Principled Technologies, we frequently publish reports that evaluate the performance of hot new consumer devices, and many of those reports include WebXPRT scores. For example, check out our extensive testing of HP ZBook G10 mobile workstations or our detailed comparison of Lenovo ThinkPad, ThinkBook, and ThinkCentre devices to their Apple Mac counterparts.

The XPRTs can help anyone stuck in the back-to-school shopping blues make better-informed and more confident tech purchases. As this new school year begins, 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

Putting together a good WebXPRT workload proposal

Recently, we announced that we’re moving forward with the development of a new AI-focused WebXPRT 4 workload. It will be an auxiliary workload, which means that it will run as a separate, optional test, and it won’t affect existing WebXPRT 4 tests or scores. Although the inspiration for this new workload came from internal WebXPRT discussions—and, let’s face it, from the huge increase in importance of AI—we wanted to remind you that we’re always open to hearing your WebXPRT workload ideas. If you’d like to submit proposals for new workloads, you don’t have to follow a formal process. Just contact us, and we’ll start the conversation.

If you do decide to send us a workload proposal, it will be helpful to know the types of parameters that we keep in mind. Below, we discuss some of the key questions we ask when we evaluate new WebXPRT workload ideas.

Will it be relevant and interesting to real users, lab testers, and tech reviewers?

When considering a WebXPRT workload proposal, the first two criteria are simple: is it relevant in real life, and are people interested in the workload? We created WebXPRT to evaluate device performance using web-based tasks that consumers are likely to experience daily, so real-life relevance has always been an essential requirement for us throughout development. There are many technologies, functions, and use cases that we could test in a web environment, but only some are relevant to common applications or usage patterns and are likely to draw the interest of real users, lab testers, and technical reviewers.

Will it have cross-platform support?

Currently, WebXPRT runs on almost any web browser and almost every device that supports a web browser. We would like to keep that level of cross-platform support when we introduce new workloads. However, technical differences in how various browsers execute tasks make it challenging to include certain scenarios without undermining our cross-platform ideal. When considering any workload proposal, one of the first questions we ask is, “Will it work on all the major browsers and operating systems?”

There are special exceptions to this guideline. For instance, we’re still in the early days of browser-based AI, and it’s unlikely that a new browser-based AI workload will run on every major browser. If it’s a particularly compelling idea, such as the AI scenario we’re currently working on, we may consider including it as an auxiliary test.

Will it differentiate performance between different types of devices?

XPRT benchmarks provide users with accurate measures for evaluating how well target systems or technologies perform specific tasks. With a broadly targeted benchmark like WebXPRT, if the workloads are so heavy that most devices can’t handle them or so light that most devices complete them without being taxed, the results will be of little use for helping buyers evaluating systems and making purchasing decisions, OEM labs, and the tech press.

That’s why, with any new WebXPRT workload, we look for a sweet spot with respect to how computationally demanding it will be. We want it to run on a wide range of devices—from low-end devices that are several years old to brand-new high-end devices, and everything in between. We also want users to see a wide range of workload scores and resulting overall scores that accurately reflect the experiences those systems deliver, so they can easily grasp the different performance capabilities of the devices under test.

Will results be consistent and easily replicated?

Finally, WebXPRT workloads should produce scores that consistently fall within an acceptable margin of error and are easily replicated with additional testing or comparable gear. Some web technologies are very sensitive to uncontrollable or unpredictable variables, such as internet speed. A workload that measures one of those technologies would be unlikely to produce results that are consistent and easily replicated.

We hope this post will be useful if you’re thinking about potential new workloads that you’d like to see in WebXPRT. If you have any general thoughts about browser performance testing or specific workload ideas that you’d like us to consider, please let us know.

Justin

Want to know how your device performs? Explore the XPRT results database

If you only recently started using the XPRT benchmarks, you may not know about one of the free resources we offer—the XPRT results database. Our results database currently holds more than 3,650 test results from over 150 sources, including global tech press outlets, OEM labs, and independent testers. It serves as a treasure trove of current and historical performance data across all the XPRT benchmarks and hundreds of devices. You can use these results and the results of the same XPRTs on your device to get a sense of how well your device performs.

We update the results database several times a week, adding selected results from our own internal lab testing, reliable media sources, and end-of-test user submissions. (After you run one of the XPRTs, you can choose to submit the results, but don’t worry—this is opt-in. Your results do not automatically appear in the database.) Before adding a result, we also look at any available system information and evaluate whether the score makes sense and is consistent with general expectations.

There are three primary ways that you can explore the XPRT results database.

The first is by visiting the main BenchmarkXPRT results browser, which displays results entries for all of the XPRT benchmarks in chronological order (see the screenshot below). You can filter the results by selecting a benchmark from the drop-down menu. You can also type values, such as a vendor name (e.g., Dell) or the name of a tech publication (e.g., PCWorld) into the free-form filter field. For results we’ve produced in our lab, clicking “PT” in the Source column takes you to a page with additional configuration information for the test system. For sources outside our lab, clicking the source name takes you to the original article or review that contains the result.

The second way to access our published results is by visiting the results page for an individual XPRT benchmark. Start by going to the page of the benchmark that interests you (e.g., CrXPRT.com) , and looking for the blue View Results button. Clicking the button takes you to a page that displays results for only that benchmark. You can use the free-form filter on the page to filter those results, and you can use the Benchmarks drop-down menu to jump to the other individual XPRT results pages.

The third way to view our results database is with the WebXPRT 4 results viewer. The viewer provides an information-packed, interactive tool with which you can explore data from the curated set of WebXPRT 4 results we’ve published on our site. We’ll discuss the features of the WebXPRT 4 results viewer in more detail in a future post.

You can use any of these approaches to compare the results of an XPRT on your device with our many published results. We hope you’ll take some time to explore the information in our results database and that it proves to be helpful to you. If you have ideas for new features or suggestions for improvement, we’d love to hear from you!

Justin

WebXPRT benchmarking tips from the XPRT lab

Occasionally, we receive inquiries from XPRT users asking for help determining why two systems with the same hardware configuration are producing significantly different WebXPRT scores. This can happen for many reasons, including different software stacks, but score variability can also result from different testing behaviors and environments. While some degree of variability is normal, these types of questions provide us with an opportunity to talk about some of the basic benchmarking practices we follow in the XPRT lab to produce the most consistent and reliable scores.

Below, we list a few basic best practices you might find useful in your testing. Most of them relate to evaluating browser performance with WebXPRT, but several of these practices apply to other benchmarks as well.

  • Hardware is not the only important factor: Most people know that different browsers produce different performance scores on the same system. Testers are not, however, always aware of shifts in performance between different versions of the same browser. While most updates don’t have a large impact on performance, a few updates have increased (or even decreased) browser performance by a significant amount. For this reason, it’s always important to record and disclose the extended browser version number for each test run. The same principle applies to any other relevant software.
  • Keep a thorough record of system information: We record detailed information about a test system’s key hardware and software components, including full model and version numbers. This information is not only important for later disclosure if we choose to publish a result, it can also sometimes help to pinpoint system differences that explain why two seemingly identical devices are producing very different scores. We also want people to be able to reproduce our results to the closest extent possible, so that commitment involves recording and disclosing more detail than you’ll find in some tech articles and product reviews.
  • Test with clean images: We typically use an out-of-box (OOB) method for testing new devices in the XPRT lab. OOB testing means that other than running the initial OS and browser version updates that users are likely to run after first turning on the device, we change as little as possible before testing. We want to assess the performance that buyers are likely to see when they first purchase the device and before they install additional software. This is the best way to provide an accurate assessment of the performance retail buyers will experience from their new devices. That said, the OOB method is not appropriate for certain types of testing, such as when you want to compare as close to identical system images as possible, or when you want to remove as much pre-loaded software as possible.
  • Turn off automatic updates: We do our best to eliminate or minimize app and system updates after initial setup. Some vendors are making it more difficult to turn off updates completely, but you should always double-check update settings before testing.
  • Get a baseline for system processes: Depending on the system and the OS, a significant amount of system-level activity can be going on in the background after you turn it on. As much as possible, we like to wait for a stable baseline (idle time) of system activity before kicking off a test. If we start testing immediately after booting the system, we often see higher variance in the first run before the scores start to tighten up.
  • Use more than one data point: Because of natural variance, our standard practice in the XPRT lab is to publish a score that represents the median from three to five runs, if not more. If you run a benchmark only once and the score differs significantly from other published scores, your result could be an outlier that you would not see again under stable testing conditions or over the course of multiple runs.


We hope these tips will help make your testing more accurate. If you have any questions about WebXPRT, the other XPRTs, or benchmarking in general, feel free to ask!

Justin

Check out the other XPRTs:

Forgot your password?