Andes Technology Corporation First Vendor to Use Official EEMBC Certified CoreMark Results to Reveal the Performance for Its Entire CPU Product Line

All Andes CPU Cores Achieve Performance Results Exceeding 3 CoreMark/MHz

HSINCHU, Taiwan – October 6, 2015 – Andes Technology Corporation, the leading Asia-based supplier of small, low-power 32-bit embedded CPU cores, today announced that the EEMBC Technology Center (ETC) has officially certified CoreMark results for the company’s entire CPU product line. EEMBC certification ensures that scores are repeatable, accurate, obtained fairly, and derived according to EEMBC's rules. This certification is the most extensive carried out by any EEMBC member and ranges from the 2-stage pipeline Andes N705 CPU core, which achieved a CoreMark/MHz score of 3.32 to the 8-stage pipeline Andes N1337 CPU core that achieved a CoreMark/MHz score of 3.13 (see table below). The measurement of CoreMark/MHz can provide a good initial comparison of how much power will vary between different cores for the same level of performance.

“Andes is extremely pleased to have completed the certification of all our cores on the CoreMark benchmark,” said Charlie Hong-Men Su, Ph.D. Andes Technology CTO and Senior Vice President of R&D. “This represents the strength of our offering based on our CPU cores and the latest compiler technologies, which we continue to advance. Embedded applications where Andes cores find the greatest design activity are unique in that they require high performance, low power consumption, and small die size. CoreMark results, together with achievable frequencies, provide our customers a good initial indication of the amount of total performance each of our cores can achieve so they can select the core with the smallest silicon footprint and lowest power consumption to fit their end application. Once a customer selects a core, we often work with them to measure performance for their specific application, with the goal of keeping the power at a minimum. For example, a recent electronic shelf label design win needed to operate for five years on battery power and they chose an N801 core running 60 MHz.“

“I’m very impressed with the extensive list of certified CoreMark results that Andes has revealed – clearly providing a great service to its customers. Furthermore, Andes is the first EEMBC member to have all of its processor cores certified for the CoreMark benchmark,” said Markus Levy, EEMBC President. “As designers increase the number of cores going into embedded applications, especially the ultra low-power Internet of Things, CoreMark becomes less a measure of brute force performance and more a measure of the right amount of performance for a specific design goal.”

Processor	Pipeline stages	CoreMark /MHz
Andes N705	2	3.32
Andes N801	3	3.05
Andes E801	3	3.51
Andes N968A	5	3.43
Andes N1068A	5	3.75
Andes N1337	8	3.13

About the Coremark Benchmark

Built upon objective, clearly defined, application-based criteria, the EEMBC CoreMark benchmark reflects real-world applications and tests a processor’s basic pipeline structure, as well as the ability to test basic read/write operations, integer operations, and control operations. Over time, CoreMark has replaced Dhrystone MIPS as the industry standard for measuring processor, DSP, and compiler performance.

About Andes Technology Corporation

Andes Technology Corporation is a leader in developing high-performance/low-power 32-bit processors and its associated SoC platforms to serve the rapidly growing embedded system applications worldwide. The company’s broad and deep technical expertise in microprocessor, system architecture, operating system, software tool chain development, and SoC VLSI implementation enables designers to shorten their time-to-market with quality designs. In addition, Andes’ innovative configurable platform solution allows design teams to construct unique system architecture and hardware/software partitioning to achieve the optimal SoC. For more information about Andes, please visit www.andestech.com.