News
SPEC Releases New Benchmark Standards
- By Scott Bekker
- December 30, 1999
The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC,
www.spec.org) updated its standards for benchmarking computer system performance. SPEC, an industry group focused on testing a variety of platforms and systems, today unveiled the new SPEC CPU2000 standards.
The new benchmarks test each system's speed and throughput, giving users an indication of the relative performance of a given machine. The results are based on the performance of a Sun Ultra 5_10 workstation running at 300mhz with 256MB of memory. Results for other machines are given as a multiple of the Sun's base score of 100.
SPEC CPU2000 consists of two sets of standards: CINT2000 for evaluating integer calculation performance, and CFPU for floating point performance. Both of these standards will be useful in evaluating the relative performance of a computer's processor, memory architecture, and compiler.
Advances in hardware performance, as well as new demands by applications, prompted SPEC to update their standards. However, the standards only address component performance, they are not designed to give an indication of a system's graphics or networking performance.
The first group of results on the new benchmarks consists mainly of Unix results but includes some tests of systems running Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 5 from Dell Computer Corp. (www.dell.com) and Intel Corp. (www.intel.com). - Christopher McConnell
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.