The Systems Performance Evaluation Co-operative duly announced its new suite of integer benchmarks at the end of last week. It comprises six exercises written in C, representing circuit theory, Lisp interpreter, logic design, text compression, spreadsheet and software development – the GNU compiler. The second suite, to evaluate floating point CPU performance, is expanded to 14 benchmarks, two written in C, the rest in Fortran – five of which are single-precision – representing circuit design, Monte Carlo simulation, quantum chemistry, optics, robotics, quantum physics, astrophysics, and other scientific and engineering problems. It has two kernel benchmarks. There will in future be no single SPECmark rating and instead, integer and floating point performance will be known as SPECint and SPECfp.The new benchmarks are priced at $425 for CINT92 – the integer set – and $575 for CFP92, floating point; $900 the two. Existing customers can upgrade for $300 and $400, or $600 for both.
