Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
The new SPECworkstation 4 benchmark suite is designed to measure workstation performance in professional applications. The full suite consists of 23 workloads with 80 subtests that target four hardware subsystems.
This industry-standard benchmark measures performance across seven industry verticals, but we've winnowed down the list to tests that largely focus on CPU performance. We haven't submitted these benchmarks to the SPEC organization, so be aware that these are not official benchmarks.
Financial Services and Energy
The Energy category of tests pertains to workloads commonly executed in energy-related industries, such as seismic data processing, reservoir simulations, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The Intel processors excel in the SRMP seismic data processing benchmark and the Poisson Jacobi Square Grid equation (used to simulate electrostatics, heat conduction, and fluid flow). The Ryzen 9 9900X3D is more competitive in the Convolution and Poisson Rectangular Square Grid benchmarks.
The Financial Services category measures performance in various financial applications and options pricing tasks, such as Monte Carlo probability simulations and Black Scholes pricing models. Here we can see that the Ryzen 9 9900X3D, and all of the X3D chips for that matter, perform well in these applications. This is most likely due to the additional L3 cache capacity. The Core Ultra 9 285K takes a convincing lead in the Binomial workload.
Product Design
The Product Design vertical addresses workstation performance in common tasks for product designers and engineers, such as CAD and related applications used for 3D modeling, product visualizations, and design.
The Intel chips take a pronounced lead in most of these benchmarks, including AutoDesk Inventor, Finite Element Analysis (FEM), OpenFOAM CFD, Rodinia CFD, and the hidden line removal workload.
Productivity and Development
The Productivity and Development vertical addresses software development, code compilation, general office productivity, and related activities. The CPU-sensitive tests in this lineup include extensive Python 3 benchmarks using the NumPy library and the LLVM code compilation benchmark. Intel wins those benchmarks across the board. AMD is more competitive in the Octave benchmarks, taking the lead.
AI and Machine Learning
The AI and Machine Learning vertical is one of the most important of the new benchmarks in SPECworkstation 4, as unleashing the power of AI on workstation-class workloads can deliver groundbreaking capabilities. AMD generally leads the ONNX throughput benchmarks in both SuperResolution and RestNet50 flavors, though it's more competitive in the int8 benchmarks.
The Intel chips also excel in the AI and ML benchmarks using the Pandas, Scikit-learn, and XGBoost Python-based data libraries.
Life Sciences
The Life Sciences vertical measures performance in medical imaging, genomics, molecular modeling, and pharmaceutical research workloads. For instance, the Rodinia Heart Wall test tracks the motion of the heart wall in a medical ultrasound image. The LAMMPS and NAMD benchmarks quantify performance in various molecular dynamics simulations.
- MORE: Best CPU for gaming
- MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy
- MORE: Intel vs AMD
- MORE: How to Overclock a CPU
