New
EEMBC CoreMark-Pro Benchmark Bumps Processor
Benchmarking Capabilities
Builds on Major Success and Popularity
of EEMBC CoreMark
EL DORADO HILLS, Calif. — February 26,
2015 — EEMBC®, the Embedded Microprocessor
Benchmark Consortium setting the industry standard for valuable application-specific
benchmarks, today announced the availability of CoreMark®-Pro, a
comprehensive, advanced processor benchmark working with, and enhancing, the market-proven
industry-standard EEMBC CoreMark benchmark. While CoreMark stresses the CPU pipeline,
CoreMark-Pro tests the entire processor, adding comprehensive support for
multicore technology, a combination of integer and floating-point workloads,
and data sets for utilizing larger memory subsystems.
EEMBC
has successfully achieved its goal for the original CoreMark: it has provided a
reliable, repeatable, industry-standard benchmark that has largely supplanted the
Dhrystone benchmark. Users have downloaded CoreMark almost 13,000 times and EEMBC-certified
scores are available from almost all of the worldwide processor and
microcontroller vendors, including Atmel, ARM, Freescale Semiconductor,
Imagination Technologies, Microchip Technology, NXP Semiconductors, Renesas
Electronics, and STMicroelectronics.
The EEMBC
CoreMark-Pro benchmark contains five prevalent integer workloads and four popular
floating-point workloads. The integer workloads include JPEG compression, ZIP compression,
an XML parser, the SHA-256 Secure Hash Algorithm, and a more memory-intensive version
of the original CoreMark. The floating-point workloads include a fast Fourier
transform (FFT), a linear algebra routine derived from LINPACK, a greatly improved
version of the Livermore loops benchmark, and a neural net algorithm to
evaluate patterns.
“Together,
the workloads in CoreMark-Pro represent a wide diversity of performance
characteristics, memory utilization, and instruction-level parallelism,” stated
Rajiv Adhikary, senior software engineer at Analog
Devices and chair of the EEMBC CoreMark-Pro working group. “This benchmark is
guaranteed to highlight the strengths — and weaknesses — of any processor.”
To unreservedly
establish themselves as industry standard, all EEMBC benchmarks, including
CoreMark-Pro, are defined by EEMBC members and are thoroughly tested on a wide
variety of platforms prior to release. Also, following the trail blazed by other
EEMBC industry-standard benchmarks, the portability of CoreMark-Pro is a key
requirement to ensure wide-ranging usability. Continuing with the EEMBC
CoreMark tradition, CoreMark-Pro is freely available, performs
self-verification to ensure accurate results, and supports a process whereby
users can submit their scores to the EEMBC Website. The publicly available list
of scores conveniently allows — in fact, encourages — users to make comparisons
between processors.
“Similar
to the EEMBC CoreMark usage model, the accessibility of CoreMark-Pro makes it
easier for embedded-industry experts to validate or challenge submitted
scores,” elaborated Markus Levy, EEMBC president. “Furthermore, to make
CoreMark-Pro even more accessible, its workloads encompass the CPU portion of
the tests for EEMBC AndEBench-Pro and the first results are located on the
EEMBC website.”
# # #
EEMBC, the
Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium, develops benchmark software that
helps processor architects and embedded system designers better understand the
capabilities of embedded microprocessors and the systems in which they are
used. Currently available benchmark software allows users to predict unicore
and multicore processor performance and its associated energy cost in digital
entertainment, digital imaging, networking, and office automation applications.
Additional suites address automotive, embedded Java, and telecom applications.
The consortium’s operations include an EEMBC Technology Center that provides a
full range of benchmarking and benchmark score certification services in
addition to serving as EEMBC’s R&D center for benchmark software
development.
EEMBC’s members
include AMD, Analog Devices, Andes Technology, ARM, Atmel, Avago Technologies,
Broadcom, C-Sky Microsystems, Cavium, Cypress Semiconductor, Dell, Freescale
Semiconductor, Google, Green Hills Software, IAR Systems, Imagination
Technologies, Infineon Technologies, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Marvell
Semiconductor, MediaTek, Mentor Embedded, Microchip Technology, Nokia Networks,
NVIDIA, NXP Semiconductors, Qualcomm, Realtek Semiconductor, Red Hat, Renesas
Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Silicon Labs, Somnium Technologies, Sony Computer
Entertainment, STMicroelectronics, Synopsys, Tabula, Texas Instruments, Tilera,
TOPS Systems, and Wind River Systems.
EEMBC and CoreMark
are registered trademarks of the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium.
All other trademarks appearing herein are the property of their respective
owners.