New benchmark for digital entertainment

AMD, Analog Devices, Freescale and IBM are the first four companies to publish certified scores for processors tested against the new DENbench suite.

AMD, Analog Devices, Freescale and IBM have demonstrated their support for EEMBC's new digital entertainment benchmarks by becoming the first four companies to publish certified scores for processors tested against the new DENbench suite.

Comprising more than 65 benchmark tests, EEMBC's DENbench suite gives developers 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.

Specific algorithms in the suite test the speed at which processors compress and decompress audio, video, and still images.

Other benchmarks in the suite focus on encryption and decryption algorithms commonly used in e-commerce applications.

The first processors to undergo the challenges of the new benchmarks are the Analog Devices ADSP-BF533, AMD Geode NX1500, Freescale MPC7447A and IBM 750GX.

These processors represent a wide range of performance, power, and price characteristics and therefore help to validate the effectiveness of DENbench.

For each processor, EEMBC reports individual results for each of 69 benchmark algorithms and associated datasets as well as a series of consolidated scores that provide a snapshot of performance in specific test groups, such as MPEG decode, MPEG encode (both integer and floating-point), cryptography, and still image processing.

An overall DENmark score provides a single-number performance rating for the entire DENbench suite.

Score details for all four processors tested against the new benchmarks are available for free on the EEMBC website.

"EEMBC's release of these new benchmarks and the publication of these scores from AMD, ADI, Freescale, and IBM is very timely given the rapid growth of the digital entertainment market", said industry analyst Will Strauss, founder and President of Forward Concepts.

"These benchmarks provide a comprehensive interpretation of a processor's system performance running a wide variety of digital entertainment code, and they have been constructed to allow apples-to-apples comparisons among a wide range of processors".

Like other EEMBC benchmarks, the new DENbench suite works with a proprietary test harness that allows the benchmarks to be adapted easily to any type of microprocessor or microcontroller platform.

In addition to simplifying the test of running the benchmarks, the test harness ensures that a standard method is used for measuring performance and controlling the embedded processor target platform.

"Systems designers will interpret the DENbench scores being published today depending on how they prioritise design considerations such as speed, efficiency, power consumption, and price", said Markus Levy, EEMBC President.

"The various consolidated scores that the benchmarks produce become most useful, in fact, when used to calculate how much a processor's performance 'costs' in terms of several different metrics".

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