What Is New in SPEC CPU 2026
General SPEC CPU information aside, what is new in SPEC CPU 2026? In short: a lot, but also not as much as you might think.
In the last 9 years, since SPEC CPU 2017 was released, computers have continued to scale up in performance and memory capacity. And in the server space, Intel’s x86 monopoly has been broken by AMD, hyperscalers, and others developing their own Arm-based chips. Even RISC-V has a college science project that has evolved into a complete ISA now extensive enough to build high-performance processors. So there has been a lot of change in which architectures are driving the world’s computers, never mind the evolution of those architectures.
From a high-level perspective, it is a period of very limited change. While SPEC CPU 2017 needed to address all the changes in computing hardware over the previous decade, mainly the end of Dennard Scaling and the resulting shift towards CPUs with more cores rather than just faster cores, the nine years between 2017 and 2026 have not seen any similar shift. As a result, while the consortium had previously needed to retarget large aspects of SPEC CPU to keep up with changes in CPU design, that has not been the case for SPEC CPU 2026. So while the benchmark suite has been modernized in multiple ways, it has not undergone the same kind of major changes that underpinned the release of SPEC CPU 2017.
For SPEC CPU 2026, the focus is on a broader set of benchmarks that reflect modern workloads in 2026, while also keeping up in terms of size and compatibility.
The 2026 edition of the benchmark suite has 52 benchmarks in all, 9 more than the 2016 suite. Of those, 38 are all new benchmarks. Only 14 benchmarks were kept from the 2016 suite, particularly evergreen software such as GCC, LLVM, and various data compression utilities, and even then, all of those benchmarks have been updated to both use their latest code and to use newer and deeper workloads.
With 52 benchmarks in all, there is more to cover here than there is time to cover them. Notably, Perl, x264, and Blender have all been removed from the 2026 suite. In its place are new benchmarks such as CPython, FLAC, and SQLite. There are also plenty of computational science workloads, as well as some new industry workloads, such as FPGA place and routing (VPR).
The total number of lines of code has more than doubled, going from around 7.1 million to about 16.7 million. Most of that code belongs to GCC, LLVM, and FemFlow, a finite-element fluid-dynamics simulation.
| SPEC CPU 2026 Integer Benchmarks | |||
| SPECrate | SPECspeed | Languages | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 801.xz_s | C++,C | Data compression | |
| 706.stockfish_r | C++ | Game / AI (chess) | |
| 707.ntest_r | 807.ntest_s | C++ | Game / AI (othello) |
| 708.sqlite_r | C | SQL compiler/interpreter and database | |
| 710.omnetpp_r | C++,C | Discrete event modeling | |
| 714.cpython_r | C | Python interpreter | |
| 817.flac_s | C++,C | Lossless audio compression | |
| 721.gcc_r | 821.gcc_s | C++,C | C language optimizing compiler |
| 723.llvm_r | 823.llvm_s | C++,C | C/C++ language optimizing compiler |
| 727.cppcheck_r | 827.cppcheck_s | C++ | Static analysis of C/C++ code |
| 729.abc_r | 829.abc_s | C++,C | Sequential logic synthesis and formal verification |
| 734.vpr_r | 834.vpr_s | C++,C | FPGA place and route |
| 735.gem5_r | 835.gem5_s | C++,C | Computer architecture simulation |
| 838.diamond_s | C++,C | Bioinformatics – metagenomics and protein sequencing | |
| 846.minizinc_s | C++,C | Constraint programming | |
| 750.sealcrypto_r | C++,C | Homomorphically Encrypted (HE) query | |
| 753.ns3_r | 853.ns3_s | C++ | Discrete event network simulator for internet systems |
| 854.graph500_s | C | Graph analytics | |
| 777.zstd_r | C | Data compression/decompression | |
| SPEC CPU 2026 Floating Point Benchmarks | |||
| SPECrate | SPECspeed | Languages | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 800.pot3d_s | Fortran | Solar physics: finite difference method, conjugate gradient solver | |
| 803.sph_exa_s | C++ | Astrophysics – Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) | |
| 709.cactus_r | 809.cactus_s | C++,C | Astrophysics – relativity, finite difference method, time integration |
| 811.tealeaf_s | C | High energy physics | |
| 816.nab_s | C | Molecular modeling | |
| 820.cloverleaf_s | Fortran | Explicit hydrodynamics | |
| 722.palm_r | 822.palm_s | Fortran | Atmospheric science |
| 731.astcenc_r | C++ | Image compression – Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) | |
| 736.ocio_r | C++ | Color management for visual effects and animation | |
| 737.gmsh_r | C++,C | Finite element mesh generation | |
| 748.flightdm_r | C++ | Flight dynamics models for aeronautics | |
| 749.fotonik3d_r | 849.fotonik3d_s | Fortran | Computational Electromagnetics (CEM) |
| 857.namd_s | C++ | Classical molecular dynamics simulation | |
| 765.roms_r | 865.roms_s | Fortran | Regional ocean modeling |
| 766.femflow_r | C++ | Fluid dynamics: high-order finite element method | |
| 767.nest_r | 867.nest_s | C++ | Neuroscience simulator for spiking neural network models |
| 772.marian_r | 872.marian_s | C++ | Neural machine translation for written language |
| 782.lbm_r | C | Computational fluid dynamics, Lattice Boltzmann Method | |
| 881.neutron_s | C | Physics simulation of neutron transport in nuclear reactors | |
As you might expect, the latest edition of the suite updates the benchmark suite to use much newer language standards as well. Whereas SPEC CPU 2017 was based around C99, C++03, and Fortran 2003, SPEC CPU 2026 benchmarks are based around C18, C++17, and Fortran 2018 – all of which are around 15 to 20 years newer in age. So the constituent benchmarks all have access to many newer language features, most notably C++ threading (std::thread) and Fortran concurrency (DO_CONCURRENT). The latter changes primarily impact the SPECspeed benchmarks, as SPECrate explicitly runs multiple copies of a single program rather than using multithreading within a program.
The hardware requirements have also increased somewhat, largely to keep pace with the increasing amount of RAM available within a system. SPECrate still requires 2GB of RAM per instance, which means the memory requirements for that suite of benchmarks increase rapidly with the number of CPU cores/threads in play. In practice, this means that a modern, high-end desktop CPU needs 64GB of RAM (enough to cover all 24 cores of Arrow Lake or all 32 SMT threads of Granite Ridge). Coincidentally, the memory requirements for SPECspeed have also jumped to 64GB, reflecting the workload sizes and the heavier use of multithreading there. Just as a note, we tried running it on a 128GB AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9980X system, and the run failed due to running out of memory.
Finally, it is interesting to note that the SPEC CPU group has yet again been able to maintain its penchant for selecting unusual architectures for its reference scores. For SPEC CPU 2026, the reference machine is a Lenovo ThinkSystem HR330A, which is based around a 3.0GHz Ampere eMAG 8180, a 32-core ARMv8 AArch64 processor from 2018 that uses the Skylark CPU core. This ends the long run of SPARC processors as the reference CPU, though it continues the trend of using something other than a widely adopted CPU core (e.g. Intel or AMD x86, Arm Cortex) as the reference.
And with the highlights of SPEC CPU 2026 out of the way, let us go ahead and take a look at the benchmark performance.
