SPEC—how could we live without it?

The most honest benchmarks available I first encountered the SPEC Graphics and Workstation Group (SPEC/ GWPG) in 1987 while they were still managed by the National Computer Graphics Association (NCGA). They were a bunch of engineers who were trying to establish some stability and rationalization in the evaluation of graphics workstations. That was back when we had a half dozen or more benchmarks, including one from Jon Peddie Associates. As an industry, we were struggling with application-based vs. synthetic. The benchmarks from JPA and the Graphics Performance Characterization (GPC) group, as it was known back then, were largely application- based;