SPEC updates its CPU benchmark for the first time in 11 years
The non-profit Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) has released an update of its popular CPU benchmarking tool, fittingly dubbed SPEC CPU2017. The new version contains 43 tests arranged into four suites that test CPUs' integer and floating-point performance under a multitude of workloads. Optionally, CPU2017 can measure power consumption during testing and take advantage of the OpenMP multiprocessing API. Updates to the tool are particularly noteworthy because they don't happen often; the previous version was released all the way back in 2006.
Performance in SPEC's benchmarks are an industry-standard method of quantifying CPU performance across a wide range of tasks. The tool is based on code elements taken from real-world applications, rather than synthetic code or kernels. The benchmark is distributed as source code, which ...