[exged]

EEMBC is a very poor benchmark for anything but very small embedded workloads (the datasets generally fit in a desktop CPU's L1 cache), but Micro Magic's claims are even more ludicrous. To quote the person in the article (Andy Huang, apparently their advisor):

"Using the EEMBC benchmark, we get 55,000 CoreMarks per Watt. The M1 chip is roughly the equivalent of 10,000 CoreMarks in EEMBC terms; divide this by eight cores and 15W per core, and that is less than 100 CoreMarks per Watt."

Almost every claim in this is wrong. There doesn't seem to be a published score for the M1, but looking at some Intel/AMD CPU scores on the EEMBC website [1] suggests a score of 50K points per core for comparable CPUs like the Ryzen 9 3900X. So the M1 is more likely around 200-300K Coremarks, not 10K. The M1 also consumes around 15W for the entire SoC, not 15W per core. The real Coremarks/watt of the M1 is probably closer to 20K than 100.

Suddenly 55,000 Coremarks per watt for their chip doesn't sound so impressive when you realize the M1 also contains a full LPDDR4X memory controller, GPU, neural net accelerator, etc. and has 10x the IPC even on this extremely simple benchmark...

[1] https://www.eembc.org/coremark/scores.php

[supermatt]

No idea how valid these are, as I'm not entirely sure what I am doing. The single threaded one seemed to spread the load over a couple of cores, but they remained mostly idle. The other tests ramped up to consume a core per thread

CoreMark 1.0 : 30866.579211 / GCCApple LLVM 12.0.0 (clang-1200.0.32.27) -O2 -DMULTITHREAD=1 -DUSE_PTHREAD -DPERFORMANCE_RUN=1 / Heap

CoreMark 1.0 : 111219.240929 / GCCApple LLVM 12.0.0 (clang-1200.0.32.27) -O2 -DMULTITHREAD=4 -DUSE_PTHREAD -DPERFORMANCE_RUN=1 / Heap / 4:PThreads

CoreMark 1.0 : 162568.583621 / GCCApple LLVM 12.0.0 (clang-1200.0.32.27) -O2 -DMULTITHREAD=8 -DUSE_PTHREAD -DPERFORMANCE_RUN=1 / Heap / 8:PThreads

So it seems too be about 30k for each of the performance cores (max 3W/core = ~10k/W), and 10k for each of the efficiency cores (max 0.3W/core = ~33k/W)?

Of course, the CPU frequency doesn't immediately ramp up, so I guess this isn't a fair assessment anyway, and I can't tell what the frequency/power consumption of each core - just going off published stats.

Either way, the figures in this article are far from reliable.