New EEMBC CoreMark-Pro Benchmark Bumps Processor Benchmarking Capabilities

Builds on Major Success and Popularity of EEMBC CoreMark

EL DORADO HILLS, CA-- Feb 27, 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."

About EEMBC
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.