Benchmarks

EEMBC

MIPS is a member of the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC).  We use their benchmarking tools extensively for our in-house developed and published benchmark results.  Our published EEMBC benchmark scores can be viewed online at: http://www.coremark.org/benchmark/index.php?pg=benchmark.  If you are testing a MIPS core and would like to run the EEMBC benchmarks yourself, contact EEMBC for licensing information.  www.eembc.org

CoreMark

CoreMark is produced by EEMBC and is a simple benchmark that is designed specifically to test the functionality of a processor core. CoreMark is not system dependent, therefore it functions the same regardless of the platform (e.g. big/little endian, high-end or low-end processor). Running CoreMark produces a single-number score allowing users to make quick comparisons between processors.

CoreMark runs on Linux and Android, you can download it here

Other Benchmarks

Dhrystone

Dhrystone is a synthetic benchmark program developed in 1984 by Reinhold P. Weicker intended to be representative of system (integer) programming. It’s one of the oldest benchmarks and probably the most abused but the industry still pays attention to it. This is typically the first benchmark we run on every product. Dhrystone scores are expressed in DMIPS (Dhrystone MIPS) and scale very accurately with the CPU clock frequency.  We publish our scores as DMIPS per MHz.

As a customer you should be very skeptical of any published DMIPS number and ask for specific details on how it was achieved including the compiler and operating system.

Android Benchmarks and Utilities

MCpuMon is an Android “apk” application developed by MIPS to report the CPU utilization and threads.  You can install this application on any Android device.  To install the application follow these steps:

  1. Download MCpuMon, decompress and copy to a MicroSD card.
  2. Install the MicroSD card in the slot of your Android device
  3. Using a free utility like “appInstaller” install the application on your device.
  4. Run the utility by clicking on the MCpuMon icon on the screen.