Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC)

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) is a non-profit consortium formed in 1988 by computer hardware and software vendors to establish, maintain and endorse standardised benchmarks for evaluating system performance. SPEC develops widely recognized benchmark suites that measure CPU performance, storage, graphics, Java and virtualized environments, networking and more. Their benchmark results and methodologies are used by vendors, systems integrators and customers to compare and validate performance claims in a repeatable, transparent way.

SPEC maintains and publishes multiple benchmark families (for example SPEC CPU, SPECviewperf, SPECjbb, SPEC SFS and SPECvirt) and provides run rules, validation procedures and result repositories to ensure consistency and credibility of published numbers. SPECviewperf (often distributed as viewperf or viewperf.exe on Windows) is a SPEC benchmark used to evaluate 3D graphics and workstation performance using industry-standard CAD and c...