CoreMark/MHz is a measurement of single thread performance per clock frequency based on the CoreMark benchmark.

Overview

CoreMark/MHz is a measurement of single thread performance per clock frequency. The number is based on the CoreMark benchmark score. It is obtained by taking the single-core CoreMark number and dividing it by the clock speed used when the benchmark is performed.

While CoreMark is a relatively simple benchmark that addresses some of the deficiencies with Dhrystone, it has been designed around embedded applications and therefore demonstrates highly favorable numbers for relatively simple designs (e.g., dual-issue in-order) while having weaker performance scaling in complex designs (e.g., out-of-order superscalar). Therefore it may sometimes show that a very well-design in-order core achieves >80% of the performance of very complex high-performance OoO cores while real-world applications will demonstratively show significantly bigger gaps and discrepancies. Additionally, since the score is normalized by clock frequency, it cannot be used to derived absolute performances. Furthermore, since it's possible to achieve higher CoreMark at considerably lower frequency through well-known techniques such as shortening the pipeline which saves a significant amount of silicon, using CoreMark/MHz per unit area to derive area-efficiency is problematic.

Scores

Note that some values were taken as reported by the chip designers while other values were calculated by WikiChip.

Designer	Microarchitecture	Intro	ISA	CoreMark/MHz
Arm	Cortex-M55	February 10, 2020	ARMv8.1-M Mainline, FPU, Helium	4.2
Arm	Cortex-M7		ARMv7-M, FPU	5.01
Arm	Cortex-M35P		ARMv8-M Mainline, FPU	4.02
Arm	Cortex-M33		ARMv8-M Mainline, FPU	4.02
Arm	Cortex-M4		ARMv7-M, FPU	3.42
Arm	Cortex-M3		ARMv7-M	3.34
Arm	Cortex-M23		ARMv8-M Mainline	2.64
OnChip	Apicalis		RV32IM	2.7
Arm	Cortex-M1		ARMv6-M	1.85
Arm	Cortex-M0+		ARMv6-M	2.46
Arm	Cortex-M0		ARMv6-M	2.33
Arm	Cortex-R4		ARMv7-R	3.47
Arm	Cortex-R5		ARMv7-R	3.47
Arm	Cortex-R7		ARMv7-R	4.62
Arm	Cortex-R8		ARMv7-R	4.62
Arm	Cortex-R52		ARMv8-R	4.2
Arm	Cortex-R82		ARMv8-R	5.82
SiFive	E20		RV32IMC	2.51
SiFive	E21		RV32IMAC	3.1
SiFive	E24		RV32IMAFC	3.1
SiFive	U74		RV64GC	5.1
SiFive	U54		RV64GC	3.01
SiFive	E31		RV32IMAC	3.01
SiFive	E76		RV32IMAFC	5.1
SiFive	S76		RV64GC	5.1
SiFive	E34		RV32IMAFC	3.01
SiFive	S54		RV64IMAFDC	3.01
UC Berkeley	BOOMv2 (2-way)		RV64IMAFD	3.92
UC Berkeley	BOOMv2 (4-way)		RV64IMAFD	4.7
Western Digital	SweRV EH1		RV32IMC	5.78
Western Digital	SweRV EH2 single thread		RV32IMC	6.03
Western Digital	SweRV EH2 two threads		RV32IMC	7.83
Western Digital	SweRV EL2		RV32IMC	4.33
Alibaba	XT910	July 25, 2019	RV64GCV	7.1

See also

• Dhrystone DMIPS/MHz
• Whetstone WMIPS/MHz