If you already have a ton of smart home devices and you're wondering what to do next, I recommend picking up an ESP8266.

For the hardware, all you need is the ESP8266 and a display. Naturally [Lady Ada] uses her own particular spin on both devices which you can purchase if you want to create an identical device ...

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].