Today’s a big day for us here at GameBench. Our vision of an honest, transparent and industry-wide mobile benchmark has come a step closer, thanks to an important deal with ARM Semiconductors to provide access to our Enterprise suite of tools.
For those who know the mobile business, ARM needs no introduction. For everyone else, it’s worth pointing out that ARM’s chip architecture -- developed in Cambridge, UK -- lies at the heart of almost every device you’d find in any mobile phone store anywhere in the world.
ARM’s access to GameBench's Enterprise suite means that the development of this chip architecture can now benefit from our real-world performance and usability testing. These benefits will also hopefully be passed on to the many mobile players who license ARM’s processor designs.
A full and formal press release is attached below. But at this point, we should probably also explain what this deal means for GameBench and our other partners and clients in the mobile ecosystem:
It will not affect GameBench’s commercial independence in any way. We retain full control over the future of our products, and we will continue to support as many mobile devices as we can, whether they’re based on Android or iOS or Windows Phone, with ARM or Intel or even MIPS silicon.
After all, the ambition that motivates the GameBench team is to create a future in which mobile devices and apps are judged according to how well they work, rather than on the basis of who made them, how many cores or GHz they contain, or how imaginatively they are marketed. With ARM’s support, this goal is more achievable than ever.
--------- PRESS RELEASE -----------
Bristol, UK, 26th February 2015 -- GameBench has given access to its premium mobile performance and usability suite of benchmarking tools to ARM, to give the company a new way to analyse how its CPU and GPU designs handle mobile gaming and apps.
GameBench takes a fundamentally different approach to other mobile benchmarking methods. Today, most benchmarks use pre-defined, artificial workloads to measure maximal or theoretical performance. The GameBench tool measures the performance of devices running everyday apps and games, expressed through metrics such as frame rate, battery drain rate, network traffic and system resource usage.
“Our silicon partners want to understand how real-world workloads will run on mobile devices,” said James Bruce, director, mobile solutions, ARM. “We are assessing the potential of using GameBench to help partners tune the efficiency and performance of our ARM Cortex CPUs and ARM Mali GPUs.”
“We're pleased that ARM, a pioneer of the mobile industry, sees the merit of what we're trying to do,” said GameBench’s CEO, Sri Kannan Iyer. “Our goal is to develop a reliable, objective framework by which app developers, hardware makers and end users can judge the performance of any app or device. ARM’s support is key to this mission.”
Benefits to the Entire Mobile Ecosystem
A number of ARM’s biggest partners now have access GameBench’s enterprise tools and services to test their hardware, allowing them to understand and express the strengths of their products in a way that is immediately useful to app developers, marketers and the general public.
In parallel, thousands of developers, product reviewers and enthusiasts are benefiting from the free version of GameBench’s Android app, which has so far been used to test 1,600 different apps running on nearly 700 unique Android device models.
GameBench has also found a home in the QA industry. Pioneering firms like Testology and Testdroid are using GameBench on “farms” of cloud-connected devices, to rapidly assess games and apps before they released to the public.
About GameBench
GameBench is a Bristol (UK) -based, privately funded startup founded in 2012. It is independent of any other mobile company, and is committed to enabling the transparent, objective and accurate measurement of mobile performance and usability data. For more information, please visit www.gamebench.net