Your company just developed the most powerful chip ever.  Your job: to get customers interested in using it in their system designs.  Challenging?  You bet.  As fantastic as its capabilities may be, your little slab of black plastic looks pretty much just like those of your competitors.  Yes, the numbers on your brochure look great.  But, let’s face it, they’re just numbers on paper.  How exciting can they be?

The dearth of available wireless spectrum throughout the world, notably in the United States, is one of technology's hottest topics. It's driving network management policies such as bandwidth throttling, data usage caps, and blocks of particular ports, protocols and services, any or all of which (depending on which side of the debate you're on) are overdue and necessary, or overly heavy-handed and fiscally motivated.

Let’s face it: Applications are getting more complicated.  Chips are getting more complicated.  And engineering teams are generally getting smaller, not larger.  As a result, it’s incumbent on chip vendors to provide robust, easy-to-use development kits.  Design engineers rely on these kits to quickly evaluate chips and prototype key portions of their systems.

In the digital audio world, the second half of the '90s and a notable portion of the '00s were dominated by the "codec wars." Kicked off by MP3, which emerged in mid-1994, the battle was soon joined by a host of competitors; industry-standard follow-on AAC, Microsoft-developed WMA, RealNetworks-championed RealAudio, open-source favorite Ogg Vorbis, etc. And, from a surround sound standpoint, Dolby Digital was dominant in the DVD era, with DTS ascendant on the Blu-ray successor.

As last summer's formation of the Embedded Vision Alliance suggests, the transition from computer-based intelligent image processing to more compact, cost-effective and energy-efficient embedded vision products is already well underway.

Last week, Freescale announced that senior vice president Lisa Su would be leaving the company for other opportunities.

As embedded processors and applications become increasingly complex, good benchmarks are more important than ever.  System designers need good benchmarks to judge whether a processor will meet the needs of their applications, and to make accurate comparisons among processors.  Processor developers need good benchmarks to assess how their processors stack up against the competition—and to prove their processors’ capabilities to customers.

But what exactly comprises a good benchmark?