The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) released the long-awaited SPEC CPU2006 on August 24, 2006. It replaced six-year-old SPEC CPU2000. SPEC is a non-profit group, which membership is drawn from hardware and software manufacturers as well as academic and research organizations. SPEC's CPU benchmarks have been the worldwide standard for measuring compute-intensive performance since their introduction in 1989. In this article we are going to analyze the contents of the new version of the test (SPEC CPU2006), its main differences from the previous version (SPEC CPU2000), as well as our first experience with its installation and usage.
