arch-beer

Weekly Reading
 


Tom Conte is presenting (CREST Guest Speaker)


"Insight, not (Random) Numbers: A Perspective on Embedded Benchmarking "

Hamming said that the purpose of computing was "insight, not numbers." Yet today benchmarking embedded systems is a numbers game. In this talk, I will dissect Hamming's famous quote and provide some reasons to hope we can making benchmarking of embedded systems into a science. In particular, I will discuss how to model and measure quantities so that one can gain confidence in the results. I will use the industry standard EEMBC benchmark set as an example. Along the way, I will give some insight into what the EEMBC benchmarks are trying to test and where they fail.

*Bio
Thomas M. Conte is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Director, Center for Embedded Systems Research, at North Carolina State University. His research is in the areas of embedded systems architecture, microprocessor architecture, compiler code generation/optimization, and performance evaluation. Conte is the past chair of both the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Microprogramming and Microarchitecture (TC-uARCH) and the ACM's Special Interest Group on Microarchitecture (SIGMICRO). He is also a Fellow of the IEEE. Conte received his Ph.D. degree in EE from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992.