[aidenn0]

The M7 is an out-of-order processor, these all look to be in-order. Many artificial benchmarks (including Dhrystone) are very forgiving of in-order stages, so I would expect this to underperform relatively to a similarly benchmarked M7.

[Zeetah]

M7 is actually an in-order processor. It does have six-stage dual-issue pipeline.

[aidenn0]

Oh you're right. It has speculative execution, but is otherwise strictly in-order, my mistake.

[microcolonel]

Apparently good Cortex-M7s get around 5 CoreMark/MHz (NXP crossover, STM32H7), so it's almost identical per MHz, and I'm willing to bet that they can get higher frequencies with less effort (if you look at the SiFive MCUs, they run at stupid frequencies compared to similar competing cores, and were generally available almost two years ago now). For further comparison, the Broadwell Xeon I'm typing this on gets about 7.2 CoreMark/MHz (running at full turbo, 4GHz, on one core).