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.
