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.
One of the difficulties in processor simulation is finding workloads that are based on real applications. The gem5 simulator, combined with SPEC CPU 2017, has recently helped to highlight complex areas of processor design related to moving data more efficiently.
2025-05-29 SPEC has announced the availability of the SPECapc for SNX 2024 benchmark, providing a completely new take on measuring Siemens NX CAD and CAM software performance. The new benchmark is built to run on the continuous release version of Siemens NX, allowing for more frequent benchmark updates.
2025-05-01 SPEC has announced the availability of the SPECviewperf 15 benchmark, a significant update to the worldwide standard for measuring graphics performance based on professional applications. The SPECviewperf 15 benchmark includes new graphics APIs for DirectX 12 and Vulkan, workloads for new industry use cases, and support for the latest versions of the currently represented applications.
2025-02-04 Registration is open for the 16th annual ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2025), taking place May 5-9, 2024, in Toronto, Canada. For more details, visit the ICPE conference website.
In the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), enhancing the accuracy and computational efficiency of large models remains a critical challenge. As of 2024, there are over 100 commercial large language models worldwide, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT boasting more than 500 million users. The swift development of these models is driving significant advances in AI capabilities.
I’m extremely excited that SPEC has announced the release of the SPECworkstation 4.0 benchmark, a major update to SPEC’s comprehensive tool designed to measure all key aspects of workstation performance. This significant upgrade from version 3.1 incorporates cutting-edge features to keep pace with the latest workstation hardware and the evolving demands of professional applications, including the increasing reliance on AI and machine learning (ML).