SPEC Broadens Portfolio with Addition of Embedded Microprocessor Benchmarks, Creating the Industry’s Most Comprehensive Organization for Computer Performance Benchmark Standards
GAINESVILLE, Va., Oct. 30, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), the trusted global leader in computing benchmarks, today announced that EEMBC, the 25-year-old Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium, has become SPEC’s new Embedded Group (SPEC EG). EEMBC is known for developing industry-standard benchmarks for measuring the performance and energy efficiency of embedded processor hardware and software used in autonomous driving, mobile imaging, the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile devices, and more. The addition of EEMBC broadens SPEC’s portfolio with more than 15 highly regarded benchmarks for embedded computers and enables both organizations to share workloads and infrastructure costs to allow for more investment in research and development.
The combination of SPEC and EEMBC offers significant advantages to both members and customers. EEMBC gains access to workloads and harnesses developed across SPEC’s more than 20 committees, enabling faster and more efficient benchmark development. For example, SPEC EG benchmark developers can integrate the PTDaemon interface to enable measurements using a vast array of modern power analyzers and temperature sensors. EEMBC also gains access to SPEC’s administrative resources, enabling it to reduce costs and increase investments. With the addition of SPEC EG, SPEC expands its portfolio of computing benchmarks to enable measurements from the smallest microcontroller to the largest supercomputers.
“SPEC warmly welcomes EEMBC as the third major performance benchmark consortium to have chosen to join SPEC, enabling us to even more broadly address the critical international need for trusted, independent computing benchmarks,” said SPEC President David Reiner. “Given the growing adoption of edge compute and IoT, along with the insatiable desire for artificial intelligence edge inference, embedded systems are a critical industry with a direct effect on all our daily lives. With a remarkable 40+ standardized benchmarks, the combination of SPEC and EEMBC means the industry now has one source for benchmarks covering most areas of compute, giving customers the ability to evaluate the specific type of performance or energy efficiency they care about most.”
“The combination of our two great organizations is a huge plus for the entire technology industry, and I’m especially happy that EEMBC member organizations are gaining access to SPEC’s comprehensive expertise across the range of computing technologies, along with a broad array of benchmark workloads,” said Peter Torelli, the retiring President and CTO of EEMBC. “Making quality benchmarks is extremely hard and only getting more complex. Continued success depends on bringing together seasoned and talented professionals to collaborate in a more comprehensive, industry leading standards organization like SPEC. I believe we have set the ideal course for the future of embedded microprocessor performance benchmarking.”
The founding members of SPEC EG include representatives from Arm, Intel, Renesas Electronics Corporation, Silicon Labs, STMicroelectronics, and Synopsys. Individuals and organizations can join SPEC EG by visiting the SPEC membership page.
Since 1997, EEMBC has developed clearly defined standards for measuring the performance and energy efficiency of embedded processor implementations, including today’s IoT edge nodes and next-generation advanced driver-assistance systems. The benchmark suites are used to obtain performance measurements of devices and to compare the performance of various processor choices for a given application. The primary audience for the scores yielded by these benchmarks are companies creating systems that rely on embedded microcontrollers and microprocessors, everything from smartphones to solar panels.
SPEC EG now offers the EEMBC benchmarks in the following areas:
- Ultra-Low Power and Internet of Things, including IoTMark, a suite of benchmarks for measuring the energy efficiency of IoT edge nodes, and ULPMark, a benchmark for quantifying the many aspects of ultra-low power microcontrollers (MCUs).
- Heterogeneous Compute, including ADASMark, a suite of performance measurement and optimization tools for automotive companies building next-generation advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), and MLMark, a machine-learning (ML) benchmark designed to measure the performance and accuracy of embedded inference.
- Single-core Processor Performance, including CoreMark, a simple yet sophisticated benchmark that produces a single-number score for comparing processors, and AutoBench, a suite of benchmarks for predicting the performance of microprocessors and microcontrollers in automotive, industrial, and general-purpose applications.
- Multi-core Processor Performance, including CoreMark-Pro and AutoBench-2.0, which add parallelism and new workloads to the single-core versions.
- Phone and Tablet, including BrowsingBench, which measures browser performance.
About SPEC
SPEC is a non-profit consortium that establishes, maintains and endorses standardized benchmarks and tools to evaluate performance for the newest generation of computing systems. Its membership comprises more than 120 leading computer hardware and software vendors, educational institutions, research organizations, and government agencies worldwide.
Media contact:
Brigit Valencia
360.597.4516
brigit@compel-pr.com
Images available upon request.
SPEC® and PTDaemon® are trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. ADASMark™, AndEBench™, AutoBench™, BrowsingBench®, CoreMark®, IoTMark®, MLMark® and ULPMark® are trademarks of EEMBC. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.
