Using SPEC CPU2006 Benchmark Results to Compare the Compute ...

Using SPEC CPU2006 Benchmark Results to
Compare the Compute Performance of Servers
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June 2010, Revision 1.0

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Contents
1 Why Should SPEC CPU2006 Matter to You? ......................................................................................................... 3
Integer or Floating-Point Workloads: Which Matters to You?.................... 3
Base or Peak Metrics: Which Matters to You? .......... 4
Rate or Speed Metrics: Which Matters to You? ........ 4
2 Interpreting SPEC CPU2006 Scores and Comparing Systems ............................................................................ 6
How to Find and Fetch SPEC CPU2006 Scores to Compare ................... 6
What SPEC CPU2006 Is Not Intended to Measure .................................. 6
3 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 7

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1 Why Should SPEC CPU2006 Matter to You?
The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) CPU2006 benchmark is an industry-standard
benchmark that is designed to compare the performance of servers. This benchmark can be run cross-
platform, so it is possible to compare systems with different architectures running the same workload,
such as Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron, Intel Itanium, IBM Power7, ...