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The SPEC Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (GWPG) is committed to supporting the Siemens NX user and development communities with reliable, vendor-neutral benchmarks, and 2025 saw the release of two crucial new tools to ensure every component of the processor-intensive design software can be accurately assessed.
January 29, 2026 SPECapc announced the availability of the SPECapc for SolidWorks 2025 benchmark, an update to SPEC’s performance evaluation software for vendors and users of computing systems running Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks 2025 CAD/CAM software.
2026-01-22 Mohammad Bakhshalipour from Carnegie Mellon University has been recognized as the winner of the 2025 Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award for his work, “Bridging Real-Time Robotics and Computer Architecture” The award will be presented at the 17th Annual ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) conference.
In 2025, the SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization (SPECgpc) Committee set out to modernize our worldwide standard SPECviewperf benchmark to meet the demands of the latest graphics workflows and to make it easier to update the benchmark in the future. I’m extremely pleased to report that our team delivered not one, but two major steps toward those goals, releasing the SPECviewperf 15 benchmark in May, followed by the SPECviewperf 15.0.1 benchmark in December.
2025-12-11 SPECgpc announced the availability of the SPECviewperf 15.0.1 benchmark, a significant update to the worldwide standard for measuring graphics performance based on professional applications. The updated benchmark introduces snx-05, a workload based on Siemens NX 2406, rounding out the benchmark’s support for high-end CAD applications.
The SPEC Cloud Committee is currently developing a novel system-level benchmark for datacenters that mimics emerging cloud use-cases and exercises all the relevant components of the modern infrastructure. The primary objective of the benchmark is to establish a comprehensive suite of real-world, cloud-enabled workloads and key performance indicators that adequately capture the performance of modern datacenter systems at scale. The benchmark will also provide valuable insights that will help in the design of future generations of computing platforms. Beyond performance characterization, the benchmark is expected to model portability, reproducibility, transparency and observability, with the help of integrated telemetry and detailed reporting, thereby fostering broad industry-wide adoption.
In 2020, regulatory changes from the U.S. government inadvertently affected SPEC’s efforts to establish and promote global standardized benchmarks related to energy efficiency. The changes also had the unintended consequence of impacting U.S.-based computing system manufacturers. However, a dedicated group of internationally based SPEC International Standards Group (ISG) members worked tirelessly – and successfully – to clarify the U.S. government’s position, consequently, ensuring SPEC could continue enabling governments and businesses to more effectively achieve sustainable development and carbon emission reduction goals.