ABSTRACT
Ten years after their introduction in 1971, microprocessors became essential for board-level electronic system design. In the same manner, microprocessors are absolutely essential components for designers using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) and for integrated circuit (IC) design. instruction-set simulators serve as benchmarking platforms because processor cores as realized on an IC rarely exist as a chip. This chapter deals with the objective measurement of processor core performance with respect to the selection of processor cores for use in IC design and on FPGAs. Designers often measure microprocessor and processor core performance through comprehensive benchmarking. Consequently, benchmarking chip-level microcontroller or microprocessor performance consists of porting and compiling selected benchmarks for the target processor, downloading and running those benchmarks on the evaluation board, and recording the results. The original version of the Dhrystone benchmark quickly became successful. One indication of the Dhrystone’s success was the attempts by microprocessor vendors to unfairly inflate their Dhrystone ratings by “gaming” the benchmark.
