Embench 1.0, Already in Use at Seagate, Promises Fully-Open Real-World Comparatives for IoT Devices

Designed with real-world workloads in mind, Embench 1.0 looks to offer an easy performance comparison between different chips.

The Embench Group, a part of the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation (FOSSi Foundation), has announced the first release of its free and fully open source benchmark suite designed explicitly for Internet of Things (IoT) devices: Embench 1.0.

"Embench 1.0 is a milestone for embedded benchmarks," claims Professor David Patterson, of Google and the University of California at Berkeley, of the launch, "leveraging the best ideas from benchmarking large systems and adapting them to the embedded ecosystem."

The concept behind Embench is to move away from synthetic benchmarks like Dhrystone and CoreMark, developing an open source alternative rooted in real-world workloads - very few of which rely on floating-point performance but are instead branch intensive, memory intensive, or integer-compute intensive. After running through the 19 programs that make up the benchmark suite, Embench — for Embedded Benchmark — spits out a performance number relative to a reference platform on size, speed, and speed per megahertz.

While Embench 1.0 marks the first full release, the project has already won fans in industry. "Seagate has been using the Embench benchmarks to measure the performance of our recently announced high-performance and area-optimized RISC-V cores," explains Seagate engineering director Richard Bohn. "We have found that the various workloads of the benchmarks provide us with useful guidance in the design tradeoffs among execution performance, memory footprint, and power estimations that we have to make in our RISC-V designs. Embench provides us with an excellent industry-standard, open source, evolutionary set of benchmarks that enable us to make complex design decisions."

"Without a doubt, Embench will have a positive, transformative, and lasting impact on the benchmarking of embedded microprocessors," adds Professor Ray Simar, of Rice University, who was involved in the benchmark's development. "Industry and academia have struggled to address this need in the past. This time, working together, we will succeed."

The source code for Embench is available on GitHub, though at the time of writing only the earlier Embench 0.5 release was listed. New major releases are scheduled for every two years, the Embench Group has confirmed, to ensure the benchmark suite doesn't stagnate.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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