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SPEC CPU

SPEC CPU (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation's CPU benchmark suite) is the long-standing industry-standard benchmark for evaluating CPU and memory-subsystem performance. Its latest major versions (SPEC CPU 2017, preceding SPEC CPU 2006) bundle integer and floating-point workloads derived largely from scientific / HPC / traditional-enterprise applications.

On this wiki, SPEC CPU is surfaced primarily as the comparison point against which Meta's DCPerf argues its case: for hyperscale datacenter workloads, SPEC CPU does not representatively capture production-application microarchitectural behaviour (IPC, core frequency). Meta uses both internally — SPEC CPU retains value, DCPerf adds the hyperscale signal.

Seen in

• sources/2024-08-05-meta-dcperf-open-source-benchmark-suite — named as the incumbent Meta augments with DCPerf. Comparison graphs in the post show DCPerf more closely tracks production IPC + core frequency than SPEC CPU does.

Why it matters

• Industry baseline. SPEC CPU scores are the canonical public numbers CPU vendors compete on; not matching production workload shape is an instance of concepts/benchmark-methodology-bias when SPEC results are used to procurement-decide for hyperscale.
• Still useful for CPU comparison. Meta did not replace it — running SPEC CPU + DCPerf gives complementary signals.

Caveats

• This is a stub page focused on DCPerf's positioning against SPEC CPU. Internal SPEC CPU taxonomy (rate vs speed, integer vs floating-point, individual workloads like 502.gcc_r / 505.mcf_r etc.) is out of scope until a wiki source materially covers it.

Related

• systems/dcperf — the hyperscale-oriented supplement.
• concepts/benchmark-representativeness — the property DCPerf argues SPEC CPU lacks for hyperscale.
• concepts/benchmark-methodology-bias — the failure mode when SPEC CPU is over-applied to hyperscale procurement.
• concepts/hyperscale-compute-workload — the workload shape SPEC CPU under-represents.