Letter from the President - continued

EEMBC Buzzing With Activity

synchronization between work items in a platform-independent way. This would enable a realistic depiction of embedded workloads, since tasks in embedded systems are often interdependent.

Our Hypervisor working group, chaired by Frank Altschuler of Trango, has been busy assembling a detailed specification related to the performance measurements of an embedded platform with a hypervisor or virtual machine. The new HyperBench suite will utilize the existing test harness (with extensions) from MultiBench to ensure compatibility and easy porting. The new suite will also utilize existing EEMBC benchmark kernels plus newly developed hypervisor-specific benchmarks. The goal is to measure the overall performance overhead of a hypervisor, the static footprint (code and data size) of a hypervisor, as well as jitter and interrupt latency.

The Networking working group, chaired by Raghib Hussain of Cavium Networks, is leading the charge on a completely different benchmark approach for EEMBC. As you know, many processors used in networking and telecommunication applications are not your typical processor anymore. As mentioned above, these new devices are complex SoCs that give us a huge challenge when it comes to quantifying performance. We can no longer write traditional benchmark code and expect it to be relevant for such a platform. In other words, we need a way to measure the performance of the SoC as a whole. One step in this direction is a new version of EEMBC’s TCP benchmark that will evaluate a system's ability to act as a TCP/IP server and emulate system behavior using realistic TCP/IP client scenarios. Although we would still provide reference code for this benchmark, the goal is to define a workload, the inputs and the expected outputs, and an extensive certification process (which becomes even more important with this benchmark methodology).

What I've written about here is just the tip of the iceberg. Obviously, there are many details I’ve left out, but my intention was to entice you to get involved in helping define the next industry standard benchmark. Trust me, it gets more fun, interesting, and challenging with each generation of benchmark that we develop.

Markus Levy
EEMBC President