While workstation processor performance is important, it is usually a low priority when designing a new product. The system price point, and to a lesser extent the target market, determines the processor. The goal is to select the highest clock rate processor that fits in the desired system bill of materials cost. For example, a PC at a given price point may have a 800MHz AMD Athlon in a given quarter, while the next quarter it may contain a 1GHz AMD Athlon. Workstation benchmarking tools are readily available, well understood, and widely accepted.
Workstation operating environments and hardware are also very predictable and well understood.
Furthermore, workstation designers generally only need to consider two operating system categories, namely Win32 and a few Unix variants. The Pitfalls of Embedded Processor Benchmarking Unlike a workstation, it is extremely difficult to reliably benchmark processors for embedded systems. For most embedded applications, it makes no sense to buy the fastest processor. The primary goal of many embedded systems designers is to minimize cost for a given performance leve. This is in contrast to maximizing performance at a specific cost point.