HandBench: A Benchmarking Suite for Processors Embedded in Handheld Devices

Abstract — Most microprocessors are employed in embedded systems. Since many of these systems are powered by batteries, energy consumption has become an important design aspect. In order to quantify the performance and energy consumption of different architectures, a collection of benchmarks is required that closely represents the applications found on these devices. In this paper, we present a benchmarking suite called HandBench that consists of benchmarks which can be considered typical workloads of contemporary and emerging handheld devices. Existing benchmark suites such as MediaBench [4] and MiBench [3] are inappropriate for our goal for the following reasons. First, these suites contain a number of applications that are, in general, not found on battery-powered devices (e.g., applications from the automotive domain). Also, we included workloads that where not yet present in either of these collections. Furthermore, for a number of applications that are contained in these suites, we have found that the input datasets are not representative of those used in real systems (e.g., using an incorrect sampling-rate)