SPEC CPU^® 2026 benchmark

The SPEC CPU^® 2026 benchmark package contains SPEC's next-generation, industry-standardized, CPU intensive suites for measuring and comparing compute intensive performance, stressing a system's processor, memory subsystem and compiler.

The SPEC CPU 2026 benchmark price is $3000 for new customers and $2000 as an upgrade for existing licensees of SPEC CPU 2017 prior to May 5, 2026. The price for qualified non profit organizations is $750, and accredited academic institutions are eligible for a free license.

Academic licenses are granted to accredited educational institutions and must be requested by a professor or full-time staff member affiliated with the organization. Eligibility for upgrade, non-profit pricing and academic license requests will be verified before the purchase is completed. Students interested in obtaining an academic license should coordinate with a professor or full-time staff member, who must place the order on behalf of the institution.

To find out if your organization has an existing license for a SPEC product please contact SPEC at info@spec.org.

SPEC designed these suites to provide a comparative measure of compute-intensive performance across the widest practical range of hardware using workloads developed from real user applications. The benchmarks are provided as source code and require the use of compiler commands as well as other commands via a shell or command prompt window. SPEC CPU 2026 also includes an optional metric for measuring energy consumption.

The SPEC CPU 2026 benchmark package contains 52 benchmarks, organized into four suites:

• The SPECspeed^® 2026 Integer and SPECspeed^® 2026 Floating Point suites are used for comparing time for a computer to complete single tasks.
• The SPECrate^® 2026 Integer and SPECrate^® 2026 Floating Point suites measure the throughput or work per unit of time.