Our latest news items. For deeper news and views see SPEC’s Blog and SPEC’s Newsletters. We also maintain a complete archive of all Press Releases and a more complete listing of SPEC’s Media Coverage, as well as an archive of old announcements.
2022-03-10 SPEC has announced the formation of the SPEC Machine Learning Committee. The new committee will develop practical methodologies for benchmarking artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) performance in the context of real-world platforms and environments.
2022-03-03 SPECgpc® released a Linux Edition of its SPECviewperf® 2020 v3.0 performance benchmark, the worldwide standard for measuring graphics performance based on professional applications. The SPECviewperf 2020 v3.0 Linux Edition benchmark enables hardware and software vendors and consumers to measure the 3D graphics performance of systems running under the OpenGL application programming interface.
December 10, 2021: The IEEE Micro Special Issue on the Microprocessor at 50 includes an article by SPEC’s John Henning, "How Many VAXes Fit in the Palms of Your Hands?" This article, and a companion video, use the original SPECmark benchmark to show relative performance on a modern system versus a system from the 1970s.
December 9, 2021: The SPECgpc® project group has released the SPECviewperf® 2020 v3.0 benchmark. The worldwide standard for measuring graphics performance based on professional applications, the SPECviewperf 2020 benchmark measures the 3D graphics performance of systems running under the OpenGL and Direct X application programming interfaces.
October 28, 2021: SPEC has released the SPEChpc™ 2021 Benchmark Suites, designed to provide a comprehensive measure of real-world performance for High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. Offering science and engineering codes that are representative of HPC workloads and are portable across CPU and accelerators, the benchmark includes four suites, Tiny, Small, Medium, and Large, enabling fair vendor-neutral comparisons of the performance of different HPC systems, ranging from a single node to hundreds of nodes with support multiple programming models, including MPI, MPI+OpenACC, MPI+OpenMP, and MPI+OpenMP with target offload.
October 4, 2021: U.S. EPA adopts SPEC’s SERT® 2.0.4 Suite; The United States Department of Energy’s (DOE) Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a memo titled "ENERGY STAR Computer Servers SERT V2.0.4 Clarification Memo" clarifying that certifying to the ENERGY STAR Version 3.0 Computer Servers Program shall require using the newly updated SERT 2.0.4 Suite from this point forward.
September 14, 2021: SPEC’s Call for nominations for the Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award 2021. The program is open to dissertations that have been defended between October 2020 and September 2021. Deadline for submissions is September 30, 2021.
September 14, 2021: SPEC has released the SPECvirt® Datacenter 2021 benchmark, a multi-host benchmark using simulated and real-life workloads to measure the overall efficiency of virtualization solutions and their management environments.
June 23, 2021: The SPECgpc® project group has released the SPECviewperf® 2020 v2.0 benchmark, with an updated SOLIDWORKS-06 viewset that uses the same viewport rendering modes in both 4K and 2K resolutions. In addition, viewsets are now individually downloaded and may be independently installed and removed using the new “Manage Viewsets” utility.