New yardstick released for chip speed
- Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) released a new benchmark, SPEC CPU2006, to compare the performance of different processors. The speed test replaces the CPU2000 test, which has grown long in the tooth, the organization said.
"Like bread, benchmarks need to stay fresh," said SPEC President Walter Bays in a statement. "It's time for a new standard that better reflects changes brought on by the latest computer technology."
The new benchmark has two elements, one for handling "integer" data, which includes the bulk of business computing operations, and one for "floating-point" data, for mathematical and scientific operations. The test uses 12 applications to produce the integer results and 17 applications to produce the floating-point results. The results are available either in SPECint2006 and SPECfp2006, which measure the standalone performance of the respective facets, or SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_rate2006, which measure multiple tasks simultaneously.
A DVD with the benchmark software costs $800 for new customers.
Benchmarks are tricky to develop. Aside from finding a measurement that accurately predicts performance on a huge variety of real-world tasks, the companies that collaboratively develop the speed tests often wish to pursue an agenda that makes their products look good. And even then, it's not certain all companies will participate in testing, making it hard to compare different manufacturer' products at times.