EL DORADO HILLS, Calif. — November 29, 2016 —EEMBC®, the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium setting the industry standard for valuable application-specific benchmarks, announced its effort on a benchmark to measure how gateways perform in specific Internet of Things vertical markets. In general, an IoT gateway lives at or near the ‘edge’. The gateway is used to gather and manage data from multiple sources (sensors, IoT devices), process data locally (instead of on the cloud), react to and predict events, and send data to the cloud. IoT gateways are available in many form factors to support a wide range of vertical applications including industrial automation, transportation (fleet management), digital media (retail advertising), smart cities, home automation, agriculture, and healthcare.
The EEMBC IoT Gateway working group is chaired by Rory Rudolph, senior systems engineer at Dell. “When developing an Internet of Things (IoT) gateway benchmark, it’s important to consider appropriate use cases. Because IoT use cases are incredibly diverse and involve combinations of hardware and software, the industry needs multiple benchmarks based on specific application profiles,” said Mr. Rudolph. “Having this benchmark suite will greatly help purchasing managers and solution developers find the best products for their application requirements.”
This EEMBC benchmark will utilize a distributed approach with client-server interactions and workloads generated across multiple physical ports. The benefit of this methodology is that it will test the system as a whole including the processor, physical and wireless interfaces (e.g. WiFi, Bluetooth), operating system, and other elements.
“The EEMBC IoT gateway benchmark will standardize assumptions about gateway operational conditions to ensure meaningful comparisons between gateway products,” said Paul Teich, Principal Analyst, Tirias Research and technical advisor to EEMBC. “Today, without this standardized methodology, IoT gateway benchmarking is not realistic, with buyers having to guess about each gateway’s potential performance for things such as sensor fusion, type of processing workloads, and how much data traffic to manage.”
The EEMBC IoT gateway benchmark will complement the EEMBC Connect benchmark, also in development. The latter will provide a method to reliably determine the combined energy consumption of the system, taking into consideration the real-world effects of sensor inputs and communication (e.g. Bluetooth®, WiFi®). Current IoT gateway working group members include ARM, Dell, Flex, and Intel. Contact EEMBC directly for more information about joining this working group; www.eembc.org.
EEMBC encourages vendors and manufacturers to join the consortium’s working groups to contribute their expertise and needs to the definition and development of its next-generation benchmark suites. For more information: http://www.eembc.org/iot-gateway. To join EEMBC, contact Markus Levy.
About EEMBC
EEMBC was formed in 1997 to develop performance benchmarks for the hardware and software used in embedded systems. EEMBC benchmarks help predict the performance and energy consumption of embedded processors and systems in a range of applications (e.g. autonomous driving, mobile imaging, Internet of Things, scale-out servers, and mobile devices) and disciplines (processor core functionality, floating-point, multicore, and energy consumption).
EEMBC members include Ambiq Micro, AMD, Analog Devices, Andes Technology, ARM, C-Sky Microsystems, Cavium, Codeplay, Cypress Semiconductor, Dell, Flex, Green Hills Software, Huawei Technologies, IAR Systems, Imagination Technologies-MIPS, Infineon Technologies, Intel, Marvell Semiconductor, Microchip Technology, Nokia Networks, Nordic Semiconductor, NVIDIA, NXP Semiconductors, Realtek Semiconductor, Redpine Signals, Renesas Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Silicon Labs, Somnium Technologies, Sony Interactive Entertainment, STMicroelectronics, Synopsys, Texas Instruments, and Wind River Systems.
