You try coming up with something that you can run on an AVR and an i9!! I submit that it is no worse than Dhrystone or Coremark, and correlates well with those

You try coming up with something that you can run on an AVR and an i9!! I submit that it is no worse than Dhrystone or Coremark, and correlates well with those while being a lot less code. It is better than those at being impervious to tricky compiler or library optimisations -- I have seen for example libc string function implementations that unroll a loop processing 32 bit words 5 times, not 4 or 8. Why? Well, Dhrystone just happens to call that function with an 18 byte string. Every time. Ugh. They all exercise just the CPU core (load/store, arithmetic, branching) and L1 caches or SRAM. Which is not a full-system test, but is valuable information.