SPEC

benchmark, body Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.

A non-profit corporation registered in California formed to

"establish, maintain and endorse a standardized set of

relevant benchmarks that can be applied to the newest

generation of high-performance computers" (from SPEC's

bylaws). The founders believe that the user community will

benefit greatly from an objective series of

applications-oriented tests, which can serve as common

reference points and be considered during the evaluation

process.

SPEC develops suites of benchmarks intended to measure

computer performance. These are available to the public for a

fee covering development and administration costs.

The current (14 Nov 94) SPEC benchmark suites are: CINT92

(CPU intensive integer benchmarks); CFP92 (CPU intensive

floating-point benchmarks); SDM (UNIX Software Development

Workloads); SFS (System level file server (NFS) workload).

Results .

SPEC also publishes a quarterly report of SPEC news and

results, The SPEC Newsletter. Some issues are here.

There is a FAQ about SPEC here.

(1994-11-14)