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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.
January 29, 2026 SPECapc announced the availability of the SPECapc for SolidWorks 2025 benchmark, an update to SPEC’s performance evaluation software for vendors and users of computing systems running Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks 2025 CAD/CAM software.
2026-01-22 Mohammad Bakhshalipour from Carnegie Mellon University has been recognized as the winner of the 2025 Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award for his work, “Bridging Real-Time Robotics and Computer Architecture” The award will be presented at the 17th Annual ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) conference.
In 2025, the SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization (SPECgpc) Committee set out to modernize our worldwide standard SPECviewperf benchmark to meet the demands of the latest graphics workflows and to make it easier to update the benchmark in the future. I’m extremely pleased to report that our team delivered not one, but two major steps toward those goals, releasing the SPECviewperf 15 benchmark in May, followed by the SPECviewperf 15.0.1 benchmark in December.
2025-12-11 SPECgpc announced the availability of the SPECviewperf 15.0.1 benchmark, a significant update to the worldwide standard for measuring graphics performance based on professional applications. The updated benchmark introduces snx-05, a workload based on Siemens NX 2406, rounding out the benchmark’s support for high-end CAD applications.