The Embench group announces the first full release of its free and open source benchmark suite for IoT class devices. The benchmark suite, comprising 19 real programs, has proved popular across industry and academia since the pre-release version 0.5 was made available in February 2020. The project is developed by an open group, with contributors from companies and universities worldwide. The code is available under a free and open source license on GitHub (see github.com/embench/embench-iot).
Announcing the release, the Chair of the Embench Group, Prof David Patterson of Google and UC Berkeley said: "Embench 1.0 is a milestone for embedded benchmarks, leveraging the best ideas from benchmarking large systems and adapting them to the embedded ecosystem."
One of the leading industrial users of Embench is Seagate Technology, Inc. "Seagate has been using the Embench benchmarks to measure the performance of our recently announced high-performance and area-optimized RISC-V cores," said Seagate's 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."
Rice University has been one of the academic groups making major contributions to the development of Embench. Professor in the Practice, Ray Simar of Rice University said: "Without a doubt, Embench will have a positive, transformative, and lasting impact on the benchmarking of embedded microprocessors. Industry and academia have struggled to address this need in the past. This time, working together, we will succeed".
The Embench project intends to make new releases every two years, to ensure the benchmark suite stays relevant and up to date.
About Embench
The Embench group, part of the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation, was set up by Turing Award winner, Prof David Patterson in late 2018. It’s goal is to provide best in class benchmarks as an open source collaboration between industry and academia. Priority has been given to using real programs and providing a statistically robust method of determining the benchmark score.
After two years of development by the collaborating business and universities, this is the release of the first full version of the code.