CoreMark

CoreMark is a CPU benchmark developed by the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) to measure the performance of embedded processors. It is designed to be portable across architectures and compilers and to emphasize core processing work rather than memory bandwidth or I/O characteristics.

The benchmark runs a fixed, deterministic workload implemented in C, typically consisting of a small suite of microbenchmarks that exercise list processing, binary tree traversal, matrix multiplication, and a simple state-machine style routine. The tests focus on integer and floating-point operations, data structure manipulation, and control flow. The code is designed to be easy to port and to yield reproducible results across platforms when run with a consistent harness and compiler settings.

Output from CoreMark is primarily the CoreMark score; when normalized by clock speed, it is reported as CoreMark per MHz (CoreMark/MHz) to facilitate cross-silicon comparisons. Vendors and developers run CoreMark on their target devices and publish scores, often alongside the operating frequency of the test hardware.

Implementation and compliance: EEMBC provides a reference implementation and guidelines to promote consistent benchmarking. Results are expected to be obtained using the same test harness and under comparable compiler options to ensure fairness.

Limitations and context: CoreMark measures core computation performance under a fixed workload and does not model memory bandwidth, cache behavior, I/O, or representative real-world workloads. Therefore, CoreMark scores should be used alongside other benchmarks when evaluating embedded system performance.