SPEC CPU® 2006 (Retired: January 2018)

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 has been retired. See below for details on the retirement schedule and result publication.

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.

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 has retired SPEC CPU2006 as of January 9, 2018. No further result submissions are being accepted and technical support has ended.

• 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:

• SPEC Ships V1.2 (09/07/2011)
  – What's new in V1.2?
• SPEC Ships V1.1 (06/03/2008)
  – What's new in V1.1?
• SPEC Ships V1.0 (08/24/2006)
• Press Background (presented as Q&A)

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.