New, efficient parallel paradigms and models have been one of the main focuses of the research community in the domain of high-performance computing and multiprocessing systems. It is especially emphasized with the rise of many-core processors, such as graphics processing units. The development of parallel applications for different multi-core and many-core architectures becomes even harder, as it is usually needed to maintain different codebases. In this paper, we evaluate Kokkos, a new high-level parallel programming model and framework aimed at developing portable parallel programs for different architectures. We evaluated it using five different benchmark applications on the CPU and compared the results with OpenMP counterparts. The results and experiences are discussed in the paper.