The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) CPU benchmark has been widely used as a measure of computing performance for decades. The SPEC is an industry-standardized, CPU-intensive benchmark suite and the collective data provide a proxy for the history of worldwide CPU and system performance. Past efforts have not provided or enabled answers to questions such as, how has the SPEC benchmark suite evolved empirically over time and what micro-architecture artifacts have had the most influence on performance?—have any micro-benchmarks within the suite had undue influence on the results and comparisons among the codes?—can the answers to these questions provide insights to the future of computer system performance? To answer these questions, we detail our historical and statistical analysis of specific hardware artifacts (clock frequencies, core counts, etc.) on the performance of the SPEC benchmarks since 1995. We discuss in detail several methods to normalize across benchmark evolutions. We perform both isolated and collective sensitivity analyses for various hardware artifacts and we identify one benchmark (libquantum) that had somewhat undue influence on performance outcomes. We also present the use of SPEC data to predict future performance.

中文翻译：

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硬件工件对 SPEC 整数基准性能影响的详细历史和统计分析

几十年来，标准性能评估公司 (SPEC) CPU 基准测试已被广泛用作计算性能的衡量标准。 SPEC 是一个行业标准化的 CPU 密集型基准测试套件，其集合数据为全球 CPU 和系统性能的历史提供了代理。过去的努力并未提供或启用以下问题的答案：SPEC 基准测试套件如何随着时间的推移而根据经验演变，以及哪些微架构工件对性能影响最大？——套件中的任何微基准测试是否对性能产生了不当影响？代码之间的结果和比较？——这些问题的答案能否为计算机系统性能的未来提供见解？为了回答这些问题，我们详细介绍了自 1995 年以来针对 SPEC 基准性能的特定硬件工件（时钟频率、核心数量等）的历史和统计分析。我们详细讨论了几种标准化基准演变的方法。我们对各种硬件工件进行了孤立和集体敏感性分析，并确定了一个对性能结果有一定影响的基准测试 (libquantum)。我们还介绍了如何使用 SPEC 数据来预测未来的性能。