CoreMark Recognition Continues to Grow; Downloads Exceed 4000

EL DORADO HILLS, Calif., April 28, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) today announced Android porting support for its CoreMark 1.0 benchmark. This support enables CoreMark users to easily build and run CoreMark on any Android platform offering a native development kit (NDK). In testament to its widespread, international usage among engineers testing embedded processors, CoreMark downloads have exceeded 4,000 in less than 2 years after its initial release.

From the start, EEMBC has made its CoreMark benchmark openly available and it quickly became recognized as a key performance metric for embedded processors by developers and the industry. As of today, users have posted 230 CoreMark scores, benchmarking the performance of a wide variety of embedded processors from the industry's most competitive players, including AMD, Analog Devices, ARM, Broadcom, Freescale, Fujitsu, IBM, Infineon, Intel, Marvell, Microchip, MIPS, Nvidia, NXP, Renesas, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, and VIA Technologies.

"With the increasing popularity of Android, many users will benefit from our porting support for the CoreMark benchmark," said Markus Levy, president of EEMBC. "The Android port for CoreMark delivers a common port to work with to ensure everyone is running the same code."

Unlike the infamous Dhrystone(1) benchmark that CoreMark is supplanting, the CoreMark benchmark evaluates a processor's ability to perform the real tasks that embedded applications typically demand. CoreMark provides a starting point for measuring a processor's core performance and basic pipeline structure and is unsurpassed in approximating the real-world performance of the gamut of embedded processors, ranging from low-cost 8-bit microcontrollers to high-end 32-bit devices and architectures.

CoreMark source code and all available scores are freely available for download from the CoreMark website (www.coremark.org). In addition to the Android port that is now available, users can download ports for the Microchip PIC32MX440F512H, Microchip PIC32MX360F512L, Keil MCB17xx board with NXP microcontroller, and STMicroelectronic's STM3220F evaluation board.

EEMBC encourages all CoreMark users to publish their scores and platform configurations to allow users to make quick and reproducible comparisons between processors. The EEMBC Technology Center offers CoreMark score certifications for EEMBC members to ensure an extra level of credibility for the user-submitted scores, though CoreMark contains its own self-verification software.

About EEMBC

EEMBC, the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium, develops benchmarks to test embedded processors and systems. The embedded processor benchmark algorithms and applications developed by EEMBC are organized into benchmark suites targeting consumer, digital entertainment, networking, automotive/industrial, telecommunications, Java, and office equipment products. An additional suite of benchmarks, called MultiBench, specifically targets the capabilities of multicore processors. EEMBC also provides a tool called EnergyBench that concurrently measures the performance and energy consumption of a processor. The EEMBC system benchmarks represent real-world scenarios that test TCP/IP and deep packet inspection performance, browsing platform performance. These benchmarks may be obtained by joining EEMBC's open membership or through a corporate or university licensing program. The EEMBC Technology Center manages development of new benchmark software and certifies benchmark test results.

EEMBC's members include AMD, Analog Devices, Andes Technology, Applied Micro, ARM, Broadcom, Cavium Networks, Code Sourcery, Cypress Semiconductor, Freescale Semiconductor, Fujitsu Microelectronics, Green Hills Software, IAR Systems AB, IBM, Imagination Technologies, Infineon Technologies, Intel, Lockheed Martin, LSI, LynuxWorks, Marvell Semiconductor, MediaTek, Mentor Graphics, Microchip Technology, MIPS Technologies, Netlogic Microsystems, Nokia, Nvidia, NXP Semiconductors, Plurality, Qualcomm, Realtek Semiconductor, Red Hat, Renesas Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sony Computer Entertainment, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, TOPS Systems, VIA Technologies, Wind River Systems, Xerox, and Xilinx.

EEMBC is a registered trademark of the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium. All other trademarks appearing herein are the property of their respective owners.

1. Dhrystone is a synthetic computing benchmark written by Reinhold P. Weicker in 1984. It was intended to be a representative benchmark of system (integer) programming. Unfortunately, its extremely small code size made it highly susceptible to compiler optimizations and therefore not representative of most real-life programs

SOURCE EEMBC