Popularity grows for benchmark consortium

The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) is now 15 years old and has gained in popularity with embedded system designers.

Originally launched to provide comparable and objective performance data on general-purpose embedded microprocessors, EEMBC has broadened its scope to include benchmarking integrated SoCs capable of tackling both specific and general-purpose tasks, as well as the performance of smartphones and tablet PCs and next-generation firewall appliances performing deep packet inspection.

The concept of benchmarking has changed, going beyond speed measurements while performing abstract computing functions to include energy consumption and aspects of performance that are much closer to the user experience.

Today, EEMBC has 130 processor, tools and systems vendors among its commercial members and licensees. Additionally, the consortium contributes to research in the embedded processor field by licensing its benchmark suites to more than 100 universities worldwide.

The best known of EEMBC’s processor benchmarks is CoreMark, a freely licensed benchmark that has been downloaded by almost 8000 users to analyse and compare processor core performance.

Recently developed EEMBC benchmarks also include MultiBench, a tool for evaluating multicore processor performance, and AndEBench and BrowsingBench, benchmark suites that directly analyse the performance of a smartphone or tablet and indirectly measure the performance of the internal SoC as well as the system software stack.