Blue Reef Virtual Servers: Comparisons: Pricing: Spec95 benchmark. Our virtual servers are the most affordable solution for webmasters and designers who want a much more powerful and flexible solution than web hosting! Includes private-labeled web server, mail servers, ftp server, turnkey ecommerce solutions, and tons of free software and technical support.

What is the SPECint95 benchmark?

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) was created in 1988 to develop a standardized set of relevant benchmarks for evaluating performance of computer systems. The CPU benchmark results contained in this document was taken from the SPECint95 results published by SPEC.

SPEC95 is a software benchmark product which is designed to provide comparable measures of performance for compute-intensive workloads on different computer system. SPEC95 consists of two suites of benchmarks, CINT95 and CFP95. CINT95 measures and compares compute-intensive integer performance while CFP95 measures and compares compute-intensive floating point performance. Both suites of benchmarks emphasize the performance of the computer's processor, the memory architecture and the compiler (performance is more than just the processor).

CINT95 is a set of eight benchmark applications written in C which perform compute-intensive applications such as artificial intelligence, compressing and uncompressing files in memory, string and prime number manipulation, database, and graphic compression. The SPECint95 is the geometric mean of the eight normalized ratios (one for each integer benchmark). The primary services of a Virtual Server (http, ftp, etc) almost exclusively involve integer performance.

SPEC used the SPARCstation 10/40 (40 MHz SuperSPARC with no L2 cache) as a reference machine to normalize the performance metrics used in the SPEC95 suites. Thus a SPECint95 metric of 1 would represent the computing capacity equivalent to a SPARCstation 10/40. A compilation of several SPECint95 metric is shown here for your convenience (the higher the SPECint95 number the better).

Note: This test was contducted several years ago. Our computers have been since updated with more powerful processors and more system resources, thus improving virtual server performance even more.

Company	System	# of CPUs	Result	Cost
Intel*	Pentium II 400 MHz	1	15.8	~$8k
SGI	origin200	4	8.59	$15k+
SGI	origin2000	32	9.48	$100k+
SGI	Sun Ultra 1 Model 170	1	5.56	~$10k
SGI	Sun Ultra Enterprise 450	1	12.1	$80k (?)

* The computer system on this row used to be employed by Blue Reef Virtual Servers

Because we keep our hardware costs down, you benefit by 1) paying less, and 2) not being placed on an overpopulated system (which is what other hosting providers must do to offset their expensive hardware).

A very good FAQ about SPEC95 can be found at http://www.specbench.org/osg/cpu95/news/cpu95qa.html.

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