EEMBC Becomes SPEC Embedded Group

By David Reiner, President

I'm extremely excited to welcome EEMBC, the 25-year-old Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium, into the SPEC family as the new Embedded Group (SPEC EG). EEMBC is renowned for developing industry-standard benchmarks for measuring the performance and energy efficiency of embedded processors, providing the world's go-to benchmarks for autonomous driving, mobile imaging, machine learning inference, ultra-low power microcontrollers, the Internet of Things (IoT), and more. SPEC and EEMBC combining forces will significantly further both organizations' missions to provide global, independent and high-quality benchmarks, and provide one source for benchmarks which cover the smallest microcontroller to the largest supercomputers.

SPEC has collaboration and mergers in its DNA. EEMBC is the third major consortium to choose to join SPEC, and four of the six SPEC groups started as separate consortia. SPEC incorporated in 1988 to develop its first benchmark, SPECmark, now known as SPEC CPU. In 1994, the PERFECT Club, which had been in operation since 1988, joined SPEC as the High Performance Group (HPG). Two years later, the Graphics Performance Committee, formed in 1986, joined SPEC as the group now named the Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (GWPG). All four organizations were volunteer-resourced non-profits with the same purpose, only differing in the type of computer they measured. Thus, it's easy to see why merging resources, reducing overhead, supporting each other, and sharing software harnesses, workloads, and best practices allows us to run an organization which enables maximal focus on benchmark development, and is more impactful than the sum of its parts.

EEMBC members are some of the most highly regarded technology companies from across the world. They are committed to developing clearly defined, vendor-agnostic performance and energy efficiency benchmark suites for embedded processor implementations, everything from IoT edge nodes to next-generation advanced driver-assistance systems. The members and licensees use the benchmarks to obtain and publish performance measurements of their embedded devices, as well as to compare the performance of various processor choices for a given application. Where EEMBC's Coremark is the long-time industry standard benchmark for embedded microcontrollers, the most recently developed benchmark suites, such as IotMark-BLE/WiFi, SecureMark, and ULPMark, are also used as analysis tools to show the sensitivity of a platform to various design parameters on performance and energy.

The primary users of EEMBC benchmark results are manufacturers of systems with embedded microcontrollers and microprocessors. Although these manufacturers may have their own proprietary benchmarks, EEMBC's published results can eliminate the complexities and costs of purchasing, configuring and executing accurate measurements across many permutations of competitive solutions. The ability to quickly achieve accurate performance comparisons also benefits the rest of the technology ecosystem, including developers, integrators, and smaller enterprises lacking proprietary benchmarks or adequate resources.

The SPEC EG group will continue its innovative benchmark development, maintain its existing benchmarks, and preserve its database of benchmark results. This publicly available database is an excellent resource for product development and R&D, a baseline for new product comparisons, and a vehicle for improving marketing transparency and easing OEM and embedded processor vendor communication.

What the Merger Means for the SPEC & EEMBC Communities

The combination of SPEC and EEMBC significantly benefits the members of both groups. As SPEC EG members, benchmark developers can easily gain access to workloads and harnesses across SPEC's more than 20 committees. This includes, for example, the PTDaemon® interface, which dramatically simplifies power and temperature measurements and supports a wide array of power analyzers and temperature sensors. Further, the combined organization will be able to adopt the most mature methodologies and practices for benchmark run rules, fair use policies, IT infrastructure or other needed resources, whether they come from EEMBC or SPEC, to build a stronger combined organization. This will enable accelerated benchmark development, reduced administrative costs and R&D maximization.

The SPEC EG Group

With one exception, the leadership of SPEC EG will remain constant with the EEMBC board members becoming the initial SPEC EG Steering Committee members, including representatives from Arm, Intel, Renesas Electronics Corporation, Silicon Labs, STMicroelectronics and Synopsys. Peter Torelli, the current President and CTO of EEMBC has retired from this position to pursue other opportunities. Everyone within EEMBC and SPEC deeply appreciates Peter's thoughtful leadership of EEMBC over the years, and we are confident that the SPEC EG group will be able to build upon EEMBC and Peter's impressive successes, which will continue to pay dividends for the computing industry for decades to come.

[Back to SPEC blog]