The Systems Performance Evaluation Co-operative, SPEC, is scheduled to announce this week that it is abandoning the SPECmark measurement for comparing workstation performance in favour of a set of dual benchmarks that will show integer and floating-point performance separately, to get round the problem that by optimising their compilers, vendors have been able to inflate the apparent performance of their machines, as William Fellows (not John Abbott) pointed out here yesterday (CI No 1,838). Microbytes notes that the current suite favours floating-point performance, which worked to the detriment of systems not designed for scientific and technical applications. The new benchmarks should help level the playing field for commercially-oriented boxes.
