If your interest has been piqued by the inexpensive wireless-enabled goodness of the ESP8266 microcontroller, but you have been intimidated by the slightly Wild-West nature of the ecosystem that ...
In terms of standard benchmarks for microcontrollers and other embedded devices, CoreMark is probably the go-to. And we found that it had been already ported to the ESP8266 and ESP32 by [Ochrin].