Embedded benchmarking organisation EEMBC is working on test suites for multi-core processors.
“A lot of companies are doing multi-core designs and a lot of them are members,” EEMBC president Markus Levy told
EW. “All our existing benchmarks are serial code and not threaded and a vendor would have to do a lot of work to thread one.”
EEMBC produces benchmarks in several fields, including: automotive, digital entertainment, networking, office automation and telecoms.
“The multi-core code should be available to members within the next three months and ideally for licensing in eight to nine months,” said Levy.
EEMBC was originally set-up to help designers choose processors by publishing benchmarks for different applications. However, said Levy, enough firms have kept results private for the organisation to change tack and offer its benchmarks to companies for internal use. “More people have come to use the benchmarks as an analysis tool,” he said.
NXP is currently running EEMBC benchmarks on an ARM9 design, “running it against itself with floating point on and off, and cache on and cache off”, said Levy. “From my perspective it answers some of the engineering questions in performance and energy at 0.9 and 1.2V.”