SPEC CPU®2026 Credits

One of the most frequent questions SPEC® has been asked over the past decade has been "When is the next SPEC CPU® suite coming out?" This has not been easy to answer, in part because the SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark suite has been widely used.

SPEC CPU 2017 improved over its predecessors, and was intended to stand the test of time, as the computing industry continues to innovate. It has had a long and influential run.

A lot of work went into SPEC CPU 2017, and it paid off: as of April 2026, there are over 51,000 SPEC CPU 2017 results published at www.spec.org/cpu2017/results, for an average of ~338 submissions a month, ~78 a week or ~11 every day. And this doesn't include information on the runs that were not submitted to SPEC. Quite impressive for a benchmark that can take a bit of time and effort to set up and run.

Although there is a large established base set of results, the time has come to update things.

As with the previous SPEC CPU suites, the goal is to establish a suite of source code benchmarks to provide consistent, comparable measures of CPU-intensive performance. The task is not simple.

Challenges include:

• Locating meaningful programs.
• Porting them to numerous environments.
• Defining rules to govern how benchmarks are compiled, run and reported.
• Developing tools to help enforce these rules while still making things easy to use.
• Defining processes by which decisions can be made.

With the SPEC CPU 2026 suite, the SPEC CPU committee believes that it has come up with a benchmark suite that builds upon and improves the previous suite, to meet the current and next generations of computing.

The new suite:

• Increases the number of applications and application areas.
• Uses more complex application source code.
• Uses more memory for the SPECspeed metrics.
• Allows parallelization for SPECspeed programs by using OpenMP directives, C++ std::thread, or Fortran DO CONCURRENT.
• Improves the tools for building, running, and reporting.
• Clarifies and updates the run rules.
• Improves the documentation.

The SPEC CPU committee hopes that the updates will continue to to be useful for people designing and comparing computing systems.

As with previous suites, there have been numerous people whose contributions have affected the end results, especially given the long development time.

SPEC CPU benchmarks are based primarily on real-world applications (rather than using loop kernels or artificial stress tests). We therefore -- most of all -- thank the authors of those real-world applications.

Thank you to contributors via the SPEC CPU Benchmark Search Program, contributors who work for member companies, and to the many authors of open source software. They are listed in SPEC CPU 2026 Licenses and in the documentation for individual benchmarks.

We would also like to thank:

• SPEC management, who provided us with resources, and kept the SPEC CPU committee on their toes:

  • David Reiner - President, SPEC
  • Steve Realmuto and Sanjay Sharma - Chairs of the SPEC Open Systems Steering Committee.

• The SPEC office, who were the ones who really provided the CPU committee with the resources needed to get things done.

  • Dianne Rice, Cathy Sandifer, Jason Glick

• SPEC supporting contributors managing the editorial cycle for SPEC CPU 2017 result review:

  • Julie Reilly and Miriam Blatt

These are the people who spent time finding and porting code, performed testing and analysis, participating in the debate and discourse on the processes, rules and content of the suite. Much appreciation is given for their willingness to spend their talents and time working on SPEC CPU 2026 efforts and day to day SPEC work. Contributions included project leading benchmarks, providing regular resting reports, writing documentation or overseeing some aspect of the process. A little bit of each of these people can be found in the suite:

Shayantika Bhattacharya Daniel Bowers Yash Caculo Chris Cambly Mat Colgrove Shay Gal-On Mason Guy John Henning Hidekatsu Imura Sundar Iyengar Ajay Joshi Prasad Joshi

Arthur Kang Kunal Kashyap Allen Lee Junjie Li Christoph Müllner Mahesh Madhav Andres Mejia Branden Moore Rohit Prasad Stefan Reimbold Sunil Vijay Sathe Frédérique Silber-Chaussumier

Kevin Smith Michael D. Smith Van Smith Charan Soppadandi James Southern Cloyce D. Spradling Zarko Todorovski Duane Voth Kristen Yang Ronen Zohar

Of particular note:

• Mahesh Madhav led the largest number of benchmarks.
• Zarko Todorovski led the single largest benchmark.
• Kevin Smith encouraged SPEC to improve its definition of Benchmark Specials.
• John Henning is the primary author of the documentation.
• Cloyce Spradling is the primary author of the SPEC CPU toolset.

We are grateful to all four volunteers who have served as Chair of the SPEC CPU Committee during the development of SPEC CPU 2026:

• Jeff Reilly, who was present at the beginning, leading early brainstorming sessions about the new suite.
• James Bucek, who started the SPEC CPUv8 Search Program, and who shepherded many of the benchmark candidates through Step 2.
• Van Smith, who organized and hosted the largest benchathon(*) in SPEC history; encouraged the remaining step 2 benchmarks to catch up; and who corralled all the benchmarks through step 3.
• Frédérique Silber-Chaussumier, who has led us through Step 4 and through the final stages to ship the new suite.

(*) A "benchathon" is an intense code development effort; an early example is described here.

Thanks are due to those who provided specific technical assistance, for example helping with analysis, testing, or addressing specific implementation issues:

Denis Bakhvalov Prasad Battini Vaughn Betz Raj Bopardikar Tamar Christina Bertrand Coconnier Adam D'Andrea Roland Froese

Christophe Geuzaine Uyiosa Iyekekpolor Lizy John Peter Kamarchik Ruihao Li Jiangning Liu Max Locktyukhin Jason Lowe-Power

Sean McLeod Ben Niu Christopher Parrott Hans Ekkehard Plesser Dibyam Pradhan Jagan Mopuri Rao John Tramm Neeraja Yadwadkar

And in memory of those whose past contributions, support and inspiration remain with us:

• Alan Adamson
• Kaivalya Dixit
• Larry Gray
• Julie Reilly
• Tom Skornia

Finally, we thank all of the people behind the scenes in the compiler groups, architecture groups, and performance groups who supported their work for SPEC at their respective companies.