New EEMBC Benchmark Targets Improved Performance of the "Things" on the Internet of Things

Benchmark to Evaluate Energy Efficiency of Components in IoT End Points

EL DORADO HILLS, Calif. — May 12, 2015 — EEMBC^®, the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium setting the industry standard for valuable application-specific benchmarks, today announced its focus on a benchmark to ensure optimum efficiency of edge nodes (end points) on the Internet of Things (IoT). This new benchmark, currently in development within EEMBC’s IoT working group, aims to provide a standardized, industry-created and -endorsed method to provide application developers with accurate, reliable information that allows them to quickly and equitably compare the efficiency of system solutions targeted at IoT end-point applications.

An edge node, referred to as the 'thing' of the IoT, has four primary parts: 1) the sensors or transducers; 2) the processing (e.g. security, compression, protocol stack, data analysis); 3) the interfaces connecting the transducers and microcontroller; and 4) a communication mechanism used to send/receive information between the edge node and the network. When designing an edge node device, battery-life is often one of the most important factors because of the need for portability and flexibility in placement. Therefore, the new EEMBC benchmark will provide a method to reliably determine the combined energy consumption of the platform, taking into consideration the real-world effects of the 'thing' parts. This approach enables the optimized selection of the microcontroller and radio-frequency component (e.g. Bluetooth and ZigBee).

“Due to the diversity of IoT edge node applications, several configuration profiles are needed to represent the most popular functions, adding to the value and usefulness-and complexity- of the benchmarks,” said Mark Wallis, co-chair of the EEMBC IoT working group and system architect at STMicroelectronics. “These multiple configuration profiles will allow black-box comparisons of corresponding products, and white-box comparisons of platforms which may be used for other applications not covered by existing profiles, but similar enough for the benchmark to give a useful indication of the expected performance and energy efficiency of the platform.”

“With the growing market of the IoT, this benchmark will be invaluable to a broad cross section of companies across the spectrum of the electronics industry, including microcontroller vendors, manufacturers of low-power RF devices, modules, and software stacks, and especially, developers of battery-powered IoT applications,” said Brent Wilson, co-chair of the EEMBC IoT working group and director of systems engineering at Silicon Laboratories.“ We encourage all interested parties to join this working group to help determine the exact details of this IoT benchmark and ensure the benchmarks are representative of all possible scenarios.”

"EEMBC’s IoT benchmark will build upon the measurement platform and profile approach that we developed for ULPBench, our Ultra-Low Power benchmark,” said Markus Levy, EEMBC President. “From an engineering perspective, we're excited because incorporating additional performance and efficiency aspects into the measurement system, specifically the wireless and sensing pieces, presents some really interesting technical challenges.”

Current active working group members include Analog Devices, ARM, Freescale, Imagination Technologies, Microchip, NXP, Silicon Labs, STMicroelectronics, Synopsys, and Texas Instruments. Contact EEMBC directly for more information; www.eembc.org.

About EEMBC

Since 1997, EEMBC, the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium, has developed industry-standard benchmarks to test embedded processors and systems such as smart phones and network firewall appliances. EEMBC’s benchmark development work is supported by yearly member dues and license fees. EEMBC benchmarks help predict the performance and energy consumption of embedded processors and systems in a range of applications (i.e. automotive/industrial, digital imaging and entertainment, networking, office automation, telecommunications, and connected devices) and disciplines (processor core functionality, floating-point, Java, multicore, and energy consumption). The consortium’s popular CoreMark benchmark is used today by more than 15,000 people worldwide.

EEMBC’s members include AMD, Analog Devices, Andes Technology, ARM, Atmel, Avago Technologies, Broadcom, C-Sky Microsystems, Cavium, Cypress Semiconductor, Dell, Freescale Semiconductor, Green Hills Software, IAR Systems, Imagination, Infineon, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Marvell Semiconductor, MediaTek, Mentor Embedded, Microchip Technology, Nokia, NVIDIA, NXP Semiconductors, Qualcomm, Realtek Semiconductor, Red Hat, Renesas Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Silicon Labs, Somnium Technologies, Sony Computer Entertainment, STMicroelectronics, Synopsys, Texas Instruments, TOPS Systems, and Wind River.