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October 19, 2026 Two SPEC benchmark suites are approaching their retirement dates, after which technical support will be discontinued and no further result submissions will be accepted for publication.
SPEC Cloud IaaS 2018 will stop accepting submissions on October 23, 2026 03:00 AM US Eastern Time. Independent publication of new results will no longer be allowed after the retirement, as results must be reviewed and accepted by SPEC prior to public disclosure.
SPEC CPU 2017 will stop accepting submissions on November 3, 2026, 03:00 AM US Eastern Time. SPEC CPU 2017 allows rule-compliant results to be published independently. Although SPEC will not be publishing results after retirement, it is possible that licensees might choose to do so. The rules and license must still be followed and any such public publication must plainly disclose that SPEC CPU 2017 has been retired.
September 22, 2026 SPECgpc announced the availability of the SPECviewperf 15.0.1 Linux Edition benchmark, bringing SPEC’s professional graphics benchmark to supported x86_64 and aarch64 Linux workstations, enabling workstation manufacturers, GPU and driver developers, system integrators, enterprise IT and procurement teams, performance engineers, and other users to measure, compare, qualify, and optimize the graphics performance of their Linux workstations.
September 4, 2026 The ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) has issued a Call for Contributions for ICPE 2027, to be held May 24-28, 2027 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, Measurement and Empirical Evaluation; Modeling; Design and Development Processes; Managing Systems at Runtime; Platform-Related Optimizations; and Benchmarking.
Now integrated directly into the SPECapc for Siemens NX 2024 benchmark download, the SPECapc for Siemens NX 2024 WDK offers a parallel customization framework that gives you the power, flexibility, and security to measure the performance of your own GPU-specific workloads, design models, and assemblies.
August 20, 2026 Nominations are open for the Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award 2026. The award aims to recognize outstanding doctoral dissertations in the field of computer benchmarking, performance evaluation, and experimental system analysis in general. Nominated dissertations will be evaluated in terms of scientific originality, scientific significance, practical relevance, impact, and quality of the presentation. It is open to dissertations defended between October 2024 and September 2026.
August 18, 2026 SPEC has announced the SPECapc for SNX 2024 Workload Development Kit (WDK). Integrated directly into the existing SPECapc for SNX 2024 benchmark, the new WDK offers a powerful, standardized framework for users to run and measure their own GPU-specific workloads and proprietary graphics models, providing greater flexibility and security for proprietary information.
When you invest in a new computing system – whether it’s a high-performance cluster, a mission-critical server, or a high-end workstation – how do you know it will deliver the performance your workloads actually demand? For nearly four decades, the SPEC CPU benchmark suites have cut through marketing claims and delivered a trusted measure of real-world performance for procurement teams, engineers, and hardware vendors worldwide. Today, this venerable benchmark gets even better with the release of the SPEC CPU 2026 benchmark suites, a major update that brings broader workload coverage, expanded memory benchmarking, and tighter alignment with the open source software that now powers modern computing.
The SPEC Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (GWPG) is committed to supporting the Siemens NX user and development communities with reliable, vendor-neutral benchmarks, and 2025 saw the release of two crucial new tools to ensure every component of the processor-intensive design software can be accurately assessed.