SPEC CPU® 2006
The SPEC CPU® 2006 benchmark is SPEC's
industry-standardized, CPU-intensive benchmark suite, stressing a system's processor,
memory subsystem and compiler.
BENCHMARK RETIREMENT: With the release of the SPEC CPU 2017
benchmark suite, the CPU 2006 suite will be retired.
See below for details on the retirement schedule and result submission
requirements.
This benchmark suite includes the SPECint® benchmarks and the SPECfp® benchmarks.
The SPECint® 2006 benchmark contains 12 different benchmark tests and the SPECfp® 2006
benchmark contains 19 different benchmark tests.
The SPEC CPU® 2006 benchmark is available for purchase via the SPEC
order form.
SPEC designed this suite to provide a comparative
measure of compute-intensive performance across the widest practical
range of hardware using workloads developed from real user applications.
These benchmarks are provided as source code and require the user to be
comfortable using compiler commands as well as other commands via a
command interpreter using a console or command prompt window in order
to generate executable binaries.
The SPEC CPU® 2006 benchmark has several different ways to measure
computer performance. One way is to measure how fast the computer completes a
single task; this is a speed measurement. Another way is to measure how many
tasks a computer can accomplish in a certain amount of time; this is called a
throughput, capacity or rate measurement.
- The SPECspeed® metrics (e.g., the SPECint® 2006 benchmark) are
used for comparing the ability of a computer to complete single tasks.
- The SPECrate® metrics (e.g., the SPECint®_rate 2006 benchmark)
measure the throughput or rate of a machine carrying out a number of tasks.
For more information about the SPECrate® and SPECspeed® metrics, see
the technical documentation.
The current version of the benchmark suite is V1.2, released in September 2011.
SPEC CPU2006 Retirement
With the release of SPEC CPU2017, SPEC will be retiring
SPEC CPU2006. The retirement plan is as follows:
- Through September 19 2017 3AM US Eastern Time, CPU2006 and CPU2017 results
can be submitted to SPEC independently.
- From September 19, 2017 3:01AM US Eastern Time to December 26 3AM US Eastern Time, 2017,
publication of SPEC CPU2006 results on the SPEC website requires simultaneous submission
and publication of the corresponding SPEC CPU2017 results on the same configuration.
Other details:
- For SPECrate results, the same number of base copies must be used.
- Compilers and tuning may differ between the CPU2006 and CPU2017 submissions.
- Due to SPEC's result review calendar, this means
that the last day to submit CPU2006 results without an accompanying CPU2017 result
is the SPEC submission deadline of September 19, 2017 3AM US Eastern Time.
- The intent of requiring CPU2017 submissions with CPU2006 submissions is to motivate
the population of the SPEC website with CPU2017 results.
- Note: The SPEC CPU2006 rules allows rule-compliant results to be published
independently (outside of the SPEC website). There is no requirement that results
published outside of the SPEC website be accompanied by CPU2017 results.
- On December 26, 2017 3:01AM US Eastern Time, SPEC will stop accepting SPEC CPU2006
results for publication.
- By end of day on January 9, 2018 US Eastern Time, SPEC will retire SPEC CPU2006.
- After this day, further submissions not already under review will not be published
by SPEC and technical support for SPEC CPU2006 will end.
- For publication on SPEC's website by January 9th, 2018, results need to be
submitted to SPEC by the December 26, 2017 3AM US Eastern Time submission
deadline. Note that, per above, corresponding SPEC CPU2017 results are also needed.
- SPEC CPU2006 allows rule-compliant results to be published independently. Therefore, although
SPEC will not be publishing results after this date, it is possible that licensees might choose
to do so. The rules and license must still be followed and any such publication must plainly
disclose that SPEC CPU2006 has been retired (see:
http://www.spec.org/fairuse.html#Retired for more information
on how SPEC addresses retired benchmarks).
- Note that the requirements of the previous paragraph apply only to public use of the benchmark.
Benchmark retirement has no effect on licensees' internal (unpublished) use of the benchmark
product.
Results
Submitted Results
Text, HTML, CSV, PDF, and Configuration file outputs for the SPEC CPU® 2006 metrics;
includes all of the results submitted to SPEC from the SPEC member companies
and other licensees of the benchmark.
Search across all SPEC CPU® 2006 results in SPEC's online result database.
Information
Benchmark Press Releases
Press release material, documents, and announcements:
Benchmark Documentation
Technical and support documents, Run and Reporting Rules, etc.
All documentation available on the DVD is
also available here.
Benchmark Descriptions
A survey of the
benchmarks comprising each of the SPEC CPU® 2006 component suites:
- SPECint® 2006 - the integer benchmarks.
- SPECfp® 2006 - the floating point benchmarks.
- A PDF summary of all
29 benchmarks, as published in the ACM SIGARCH newsletter, Computer
Architecture News, Volume 34, No. 4, September 2006.
Related Publications
An archive of selected publications related to the suite is available.
Support
Installation, build, and runtime issues raised by users of the benchmark software.
Flags
Flag Descriptions -
explanations from the testers for what all those cryptic flags in the
results' notes section really mean.