EEMBC CoreMark Benchmark on its way to becoming a standard
CoreMark has over 2400 users, and almost 200 published scores. Scores are quoted for high end processors as well as tiny microcontrollers. In short - CoreMark is quickly becoming a standard benchmark and well on its way to replacing the outdated Dhrystone MIPS. It is encouraging to see the industry, as well as academia, adapting to a new standard so quickly, but let us not forget - CoreMark only targets core operations. EEMBC’s full-featured application benchmarks are much better suited f... more»
Atmel MCU: How low can you go?
Not too long ago, one of our CoreMark users submitted a score for the Atmel AT89C51RE2, an 8051 derivative. It's truly amazing that these devices are still around, with the original architecture that dates back more than 3 decades. As you'd expect in any benchmark contest, these devices are not blazing fast. With a CoreMark/MHz rating of 0.107, this AT89C51RE2 is at the bottom of our list (with the exception of another 8-... more»
On inlining and other compiler optimizations
CoreMark run rules allow for any compiler optimizations. Unlike Dhrystone, CoreMark relies on a design that forces any computation to happen at compile time by tracing any computation chain from a value that is not available at compile time and ends with an output. While compilers can find more efficient ways of implementing those computations, the computations cannot be done at compile time, and thus actual operation cannot be "optimized away". Dhrystone for example was split to multiple fil... more»
CoreMark Analytic Evaluation - Interview
Recently Van Smith of Canalabs submitted several scores to the CoreMark website. We asked him about his choices for run parameters... [NOTE: To put this blog into context, refer to the scores submitted on April 12 for Intel Atom N450, VIA Nano L3050, AMD Mobile Athlon XP-M (Barton), and Freescale i.MX515 at http://coremark.org/benchmark/index.php?pg=benchmark) Why did you use FORK rather then PTHREADS? Answer: I used the same set of CoreMark compiler flags and settings as I h... more»
Two CoreMark scores for the TI Stellaris were submitted recently. It is interesting to note that while the only difference between the submissions is the frequency, the CoreMark/MHz has changed (1.9 at 50MHz vs. 1.6 at 80MHz; a 16% drop). Since the device does not have cache, the CPU frequency to memory frequency ratio may come into effect, and indeed we find that the flash used on the device can only scale 1:1 with the CPU frequency up to 50MHz. Once frequency goes above 50MHz, the memory frequ... more»