The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) announced a new series of benchmarks which will measure “Digital Entertainment” performance applications. EEMBC says the benchmarks are intended to offer designers of set-top boxes, PDAs, mobile phones, and in-car entertainment systems a sophisticated new set of tools for evaluating the performance of embedded processors in their systems.

The tests consist of various kernels which are executed on the processors, and are intended to be representative of real-world applications and to provide balanced coverage of mobile and stationary platforms, according to EEMBC. Kernels for the new EEMBC Digital Entertainment benchmarks include MP3 decode, MPEG-4 video encode and decode, MPEG-2 video encode and decode, and a variety of cryptography algorithms.

EEMBC says that in comparison with previous EEMBC benchmark kernels that measure processor performance in consumer applications, the new Digital Entertainment benchmarks make more intensive use of processor computational ability, caches, and system memory, and thereby provide a detailed analysis of processor strengths and weaknesses.

“These new benchmarks provide much more extensive application-level coverage compared with the original consumer benchmark suite, with its high-pass grayscale filter, JPEG codec, and RGB conversion kernels,” explained EEMBC president Markus Levy. “This is an exciting step for EEMBC, as these benchmarks will greatly raise the bar on performance requirements for processors and compilers.”

EEMBC noted that a major challenge for the new Digital Entertainment benchmarks was to ensure they would verify that execution of variable-bit tasks were executed correctly by the processor. A team led by EEMBC Consumer Subcommittee and Certification Labs (ECL) Chairman Sergei Larin (Motorola) solved this problem by using a checksum calculated from the original “golden” file, which is subdivided into 256 samples that are equally distributed through the output. Allowing round-off within the samples, this method requires minimal code while serving as a pragmatic check on processor accuracy.

“The challenge in developing the new Digital Entertainment benchmarks lay in the complexity and size of the code,” said ECL Chairman and CEO Alan R. Weiss. “By comparison, many of the original EEMBC consumer benchmarks are relatively simple, though making industry-standard benchmark code portable to hundreds of platforms is no small challenge. The new Digital Entertainment benchmarks really do a great job of measuring performance.”

Benchmark details . . .

• MP3 Decode — Addresses implementations of MP3 decode in hardware with a focus on reprogrammable solutions for mobile phones, PDAs, and similar devices.

• MPEG-4 Video Codec — Focused on the mobile market, new benchmarks include separate encode and decode kernels.

• MPEG-2 Video Codec — Focused on higher-end products such as set-top boxes, with separate encode and decode kernels.
• Cryptography — Requiring very data-intensive processing, addresses rapidly rising demand for random number generation to facilitate financial transactions across the Internet.

Benchmark score reports on processors tested against EEMBC's new Digital Entertainment benchmarks will be available for free from the consortium's websote at www.eembc.org.

 
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