Wilkinson sets the benchmark

Graham Wilkinson of ARM has been elected to lead the EEMBC group that develops certifiable benchmarks for embedded Java implementations.

Graham Wilkinson of ARM has been elected to lead the EEMBC group that develops certifiable benchmarks for embedded Java implementations.

Wilkinson is the Technical Lead of the Java team at ARM.

He is involved daily with the testing and integration of Java VMs and has over 15 years experience in the embedded systems market.

He has been involved with all aspects of electronic, hardware, system, and software design.

As EEMBC Java chairman, he succeeds Rod Crawford, Java Debug Product Manager at ARM, who is stepping down from the chairmanship following more than two years of service to the consortium in that role.

David Proulx, Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems, will continue his role as Java Subcommittee Chairman pro-tem.

"Rod Crawford did a magnificent job as founding Chairman of the EEMBC Subcommittee, and in Graham Wilkinson we have a worthy successor who fully understands the embedded Java market and the challenges of developing objective benchmarks for Java implementations", said Markus Levy, EEMBC President.

"Graham assumes his new role at an auspicious moment, as the first scores based on EEMBC's GrinderBench suite are about to be made public".

Selected to be representative of real-world Java applications and for its resistance to manipulation, the EEMBC GrinderBench suite tests the performance of embedded Java J2ME applications in a range of real-world benchmark tasks, including photo decoding, a computation-intensive chess game, an Internet-usage benchmark for stressing CLDC threading, a cryptographic package oriented toward M-commerce, and an object-oriented benchmark to exercise object creation and garbage collection.

Used together, the components of the suite broadly exercise the Java API while avoiding the limitations of synthetic benchmarks.

"With the power of new-generation embedded processors, interest in Java is now starting to really take off", said Wilkinson.

"The advantages of a secure and portable application language can now be used for serious power applications such as 3D gaming and video streaming.

To this end a reliable method of measuring the performance of the resulting platform is required, enabling results to match expectations, costs to be predicted and controlled, all reducing risk and increasing quality.

EEMBC is now concentrating on the next generation of benchmarks that look toward these demanding applications of the future with a view not just to measure top speed, but to give real indicators of the subjective qualities such as startup response and smoothness".

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