Power Benchmark Under Way for Pro Workstations

By DE Editors

SPEC‘s (Warrenton, VA) Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (SPEC/GWPG) has begun developing an industry-standard benchmark that measures power consumption in relation to performance for professional workstations.

The SPEC/GWPG benchmark, expected to be available this summer, will incorporate workloads from the popular SPECviewperf benchmark for 3D graphics, as well as CPU workloads in areas such as rendering, financial modeling, computational fluid dynamics, scientific computing, and video encoding. Workloads will have the common attributes of scalability, open source, and portability across all major workstation computing platforms.

SPEC/GWPG is working with the SPECpower committee, developer of the recently released SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmark for servers, and receiving direct input from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Once finalized, the benchmark will be submitted to the EPA for use in its V5.0 requirements for workstation ENERGY STAR qualification.

Current participants in the SPEC/GWPG power-performance effort include AMD, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, HP, Intel, NVIDIA and Sun Microsystems.

For more information, visit the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC).

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.