Your Chance To Influence CPU Benchmarking

John Henning writes "When comparing CPUs, is it enough to look at MHz? Of course not; architecture matters, as do caches, memory systems, and compilers. Perhaps the best-known vendor-neutral CPU performance comparison is from SPEC, but SPEC plans to retire its current CPU benchmarks. If you would like to influence the benchmarks that will replace the current set, time is running out: SPEC Search Program entries are due by midnight, June 30."

Comments

Who cares?

[kawika]

I think we're at the point where it doesn't matter what a synthetic benchmark says about the performance of a CPU. The top end of today's processors have plenty of power for what 95% of people use them to do. The workloads of the remaining 5% are specialized enough that a synthetic benchmark is unlikely to be a good predictor.

I would rather have a really big and fast RAID array, 2GB of RAM, or a 2Mbps Internet connection than a faster CPU.

Re:Who cares?

[Colin Douglas Howell]

Just to clarify, SPEC's CPU benchmarks aren't synthetic benchmarks. A synthetic benchmark is a program written to test performance that doesn't do any real useful work (for example, Dhrystone). SPEC's CPU benchmarks are real applications performing real application workloads (for example, running a particle accelerator simulation, or executing Perl scripts), so they actually provide some indication of how fast a computer system with a certain compiler can perform those kind of tasks.

The biggest problems with SPEC's CPU benchmarks is that they tend to concentrate on technical applications and that people only talk about the average SPECint and SPECfp scores, neglecting the individual benchmark scores that correspond to real tasks. But you can always find the individual benchmark scores on SPEC's website.