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Recent XPRT mentions in the global tech press

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on January 2, 2025

One way we assess the XPRT’s ongoing effectiveness is to regularly track the reach of our benchmarks in the global tech press. If tech journalists decide to include an XPRT benchmark in their suite of “go-to” performance evaluation tools, we know that decision reflects a high degree of confidence in the relevance and reliability of our benchmarks. It’s especially exciting for us to see the XPRTs win the trust of more tech press outlets in an ever-increasing number of countries around the world.

Because some of our newer readers may be unaware of the wide variety of tech press outlets that use the XPRTs, we occasionally like to share an overview of recent XPRT-related global tech press activity. For today’s blog, we want to give readers a sampling of the press mentions we’ve seen over the past few months.

Recent mentions include:

If you’d like to receive monthly updates on XPRT news, we encourage you to sign up for the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community newsletter. Each month, the newsletter delivers a summary of the previous month’s XPRT-related activity, including XPRT blog posts and new mentions of the XPRTs in the tech press. If you don’t currently receive the monthly BenchmarkXPRT newsletter but would like to join the mailing list, please let us know! It’s free to join. We won’t publish, share, or sell any of the contact information you provide, and we’ll send you only the monthly newsletter and occasional benchmark-related announcements, such as news about patches or new releases.

If you have any questions about the XPRTs, suggestions for improvement, or requests for future blogs, please just contact us.

Justin

Posted in Acer, Apple, ASUS, benchmark, browser performance, CrXPRT, HP, Samsung, tech press, WebXPRT 4 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

The XPRTs: What would you like to see in 2025?

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on December 19, 2024

If you’re a new follower of the XPRT family of benchmarks, you may not be aware of one of the characteristics of the XPRTs that sets them apart from many benchmarking efforts—our openness and commitment to valuing the feedback of tech journalists, lab engineers, and anyone else that uses the XPRTs on a regular basis. That feedback helps us to ensure that as the XPRTs grow and evolve, the resources 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, UI features, results presentation, and the addition or subtraction 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 look forward to what’s in store for the XPRTs in 2025, we’d love to hear your ideas about new XPRTs—or new features for existing XPRTs. Are you aware of hardware form factors, software platforms, new technologies, or prominent applications that are difficult or impossible to evaluate using existing performance benchmarks? Should we incorporate additional or different technologies into existing XPRTs through new workloads? Do you have suggestions for ways to improve any of the XPRTs or XPRT-related tools, such as results viewers?

We’re especially interested in your thoughts about the next steps for WebXPRT. If our recent blog posts about the potential addition of an AI-focused auxiliary workload, what a WebXPRT battery life test would entail, or possible WebAssembly-based test scenarios have piqued your interest, we’d love to hear your thoughts!

We’re genuinely 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 and working together to figure out how they could help shape the XPRTs in 2025!

Justin

Posted in AI, Battery life, benchmark, BenchmarkXPRT, browser performance, Collaborative benchmark development, Future of performance evaluation, Performance benchmarking, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 4, What makes a good benchmark? | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , |

More than two million XPRT benchmark runs and downloads!

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on December 5, 2024

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

Posted in AIXPRT, benchmark, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, browser performance, Browser-based benchmarks, CloudXPRT, Collaborative benchmark development, Cross-platform benchmarks, CrXPRT, HDXPRT, MobileXPRT, Performance benchmarking, TouchXPRT, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 2013, WebXPRT 4 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Using WebXPRT 4’s language options

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on November 26, 2024

Sohu, a major Chinese site, recently published a tech review discussing their first impressions from Intel Core Ultra 5 245K and Intel Core Ultra 9 285K white box testing. In the article, they included screenshots of the WebXPRT 4 test results they produced during their evaluation. The screenshots showed that the testers had enabled WebXPRT 4’s Simplified Chinese UI. They’re not the first to use this option, and it’s one we are glad worked for them.

Though WebXPRT’s language settings menu has proven to be a popular feature for many users around the world, some folks may not even know the option is there. In today’s blog, we’ll go over the basics of this simple but helpful testing option.

On WebXPRT’s Start screen, you can choose from three language options in the WebXPRT 4 UI: Simplified Chinese, German, and English. We included Simplified Chinese and German because of the large number of tests we see from China and Central Europe. We wanted to make testing a little easier for users who prefer those languages and we’re glad to see people using the options.

Changing languages in the WebXPRT UI is quick and easy. Locate the “Change Language?” prompt under the WebXPRT 4 logo at the top of the Start screen, and click or tap the arrow beside it. After the drop-down menu appears, select the language you want. The language of the start screen will then change to the language you selected, and the in-test workload headers and end-of-test results screen will also appear in the language you selected.

Figures 1–3 below my sig show the “Change Language?” drop-down menu and how the Start screen appears when you select Simplified Chinese or German. It’s important to note that if you have a translation extension installed in your browser, it may override the WebXPRT UI by reverting the language back to your browser’s default. You can avoid this conflict by temporarily disabling the browser’s translation extension for the duration of WebXPRT testing.

We hope WebXPRT 4’s language options will help facilitate the testing process for many users around the world. If you’re a frequent WebXPRT user and would like to see us add support for another language, please contact us. And, of course, if you have any questions about WebXPRT 4 testing, please let us know!

Justin

Figure 1: A screenshot of the WebXPRT 4 Start screen showing the language options drop-down menu.
Figure 2: A screenshot of the WebXPRT 4 Start screen with a Simplified Chinese UI.
Figure 3: A screenshot of the WebXPRT 4 Start screen with a German UI.
Posted in benchmark, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, BenchmarkXPRT development community, browser performance, Browser-based benchmarks, Chinese, Cross-platform benchmarks, German, Performance benchmarking, Simplified Chinese, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 4, What makes a good benchmark? | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , |

Shop confidently this holiday season with the XPRTs!

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on November 14, 2024

The holiday shopping season is upon us, and trying to find the right tech gift for your friends or loved ones (or yourself!) can be a daunting task. If you’re considering new phones, tablets, Chromebooks, laptops, or desktops as gifts this year—and are unsure where to get reliable device information—the XPRTs can help!

The XPRTs provide industry-trusted and time-tested measures of a device’s performance that can help you cut through the fog of competing marketing claims. For example, instead of guessing whether the performance of a new gaming laptop justifies its price, you can use its WebXPRT performance score to see how it stacks up against both older models and competitors while tackling everyday tasks.

A great place to start looking for device scores is our XPRT results browser, which lets you access our database of more than 3,700 test results—across all the XPRT benchmarks and hundreds of devices—from over 155 sources, including major tech review publications around the world, OEMs, our own Principled Technologies (PT) testing, and independent submissions. For tips on how to use the XPRT results browser, check out this blog post.

Another way to view information in our results database is by using the WebXPRT 4 results viewer. The viewer provides an information-packed, interactive tool that we created to help people explore data from the set of almost 800 WebXPRT 4 results we’ve curated and published to date on our site. You’ll find detailed instructions in this blog post for how to use the WebXPRT 4 results viewer tool.

If you’re considering a popular device, it’s likely that a recent tech press review includes an XPRT score for it. To find those scores, go to your favorite tech review site and search for “XPRT,” or enter 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:

In addition to XPRT-related resources in the tech press, here at PT 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 the results from our extensive testing of a Dell Latitude 7450 AI PC or our in-depth evaluation of three new Lenovo ThinkPad and ThinkBook laptops.

The XPRTs can help you make better-informed and more confident tech purchases this holiday season. 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

Posted in Acer, Apple, ASUS, benchmark, Benchmark metrics, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, browser performance, Chromebooks, CrXPRT, Dell, Google, holiday shopping, HP, iPhone, Lenovo, PCs, Phones, Samsung, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 4 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |

Speaking of potential future WebXPRT workloads

Justin Greene
By Justin Greene
on October 31, 2024

In recent blog posts, we’ve discussed several types of potential future WebXPRT workloads—from an auxiliary AI-focused workload to a WebXPRT battery life test—and many of the factors that we would need to consider when developing those workloads. In today’s post, we’re discussing other types of workloads that we may consider for future WebXPRT versions. We’re also inviting you to send us your WebXPRT workload ideas!

Currently, the most promising web technology for future WebXPRT workloads is WebAssembly (Wasm). Wasm is a binary instruction format that works across all modern browsers, provides a sandboxed environment that operates at native speeds, and takes advantage of common hardware specs across platforms. Wasm’s capabilities offer web developers significant flexibility in running complex client applications within the browser.

We first made use of Wasm in WebXPRT 4’s Organize Album and Encrypt Notes workloads, but Wasm has the potential to support many more types of test scenarios. Here are just a few of the use-case categories that Wasm supports:

  • Gaming
  • Image and video editing
  • Video augmentation
  • CAD applications
  • Interactive learning portals
  • Language translation

Those categories and the possibilities they open for additional workloads are exciting! When thinking through possible new workload scenarios, it’s important to remember that workload proposals need to fit within a set of basic guidelines that uphold WebXPRT’s strengths as a benchmark. You can read about those guidelines in more detail in this blog post, but in short, new workloads ideally should

  • be relevant to real-life scenarios
  • have cross-platform support
  • clearly differentiate in their performance between different types of devices
  • produce consistent and easily replicated results

After testing with WebXPRT or reviewing the list of use cases that Wasm supports, have you considered a new workload or test scenario that you would like to see? If so, please let us know! Your ideas could end up playing a role in shaping the next version of WebXPRT!

Justin

Posted in battery life, benchmark, Benchmarking, BenchmarkXPRT, browser performance, Browser-based benchmarks, Collaborative benchmark development, Cross-platform benchmarks, Future of performance evaluation, image processing, Performance benchmarking, WebAssembly, WebXPRT, WebXPRT 4, What makes a good benchmark? | Tagged , , , , , , , , , |

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