1.1.1. Benchmarks. According to Hennessy and Patterson [2003], the performance of a general-purpose processor should be evaluated over a number of representative benchmark programs. The most famous benchmark suite covering various application fields was created by SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) [Hennessy and Patterson 2003]. SPEC benchmarks consist of real programs with slight modification for portability, and are widely utilized by architects, researchers, and computer vendors for performance evaluation. For example, vendors of desktop computers and servers periodically submit the performance results measured by SPEC benchmarks to www.spec.org to provide fair comparisons with other machine products.