VGM-Bench: FPU Benchmark suite for Computer Vision, Computer Graphics and Machine Learning applications

With the Internet-of-things revolution, embedded devices are in charge of an ever increasing number of tasks ranging from sensing, up to Artificial Intelligence (AI) functions. In particular, AI is gaining importance since it can dramatically improve the QoS perceived by the final user and it allows to cope with problems whose algorithmic solution is hard to find. However, the associated computational requirements, mostly made of floating-point processing, impose a careful design and tuning of the computing platforms. In this scenario, there is a need for a set of benchmarks representative of the emerging AI applications and useful to compare the efficiency of different architectural solutions and computing platforms. In this paper we present a suite of benchmarks encompassing Computer Graphics, Computer Vision and Machine Learning applications, which are greatly used in many AI scenarios. Such benchmarks, differently from other suites, are kernels tailored to be effectively executed in bare-metal and specifically stress the floating-point support offered by the computing platform.