I don’t think picking a handful of SPEC benchmarks that approximate today’s most common agentic workloads (compiling code, interpreting Python) and then calling them “agentic benchmarks” is misleading at all.
That you need a whole lot of “ordinary” compute to benefit from the scaling properties of agents is the reason Nvidia is making this chip in the first place.
The four benchmarks selected are cppcheck, llvm, cpython, and gcc [1]. These are all essentially compiler benchmarks... and all of the compiler benchmarks in SPEC cpu2026! This makes the benchmark selection somewhat suspicious to me, since it's not particularly representative of a diverse set of workloads.
I also don't buy that it's a particularly representative set of tasks you might do with agents. Also included in the SPEC benchmarks are multimedia codecs, lossless data compression codecs, sqlite (i.e., database), all of which are going to be things you should easily throw into the sets of tasks an agentic workload might do. Cherry-picking just the compiler benchmarks instead of all of SPECint... again, it just raises a couple of eyebrows.
[1] To be honest, I'm kinda surprised that both gcc and llvm are in SPEC cpu2026.
I think the choices of these workloads are deliberate, considering this is a large core count CPU linked to a FP-monster GPU with a high speed, low latency datalink.
The former implies per core memory bandwidth is probably not great, meaning SQLite wont perform as well, the latter meaning FP workloads are better done on the GPU, so video encoding wont be a high point. The idea is to run branchy integer workloads that fit into RAM imo, which is what these benchmarks measure.
twoodfin · · focus · HN ↗
That you need a whole lot of “ordinary” compute to benefit from the scaling properties of agents is the reason Nvidia is making this chip in the first place.
jcranmer · · focus · HN ↗
I also don't buy that it's a particularly representative set of tasks you might do with agents. Also included in the SPEC benchmarks are multimedia codecs, lossless data compression codecs, sqlite (i.e., database), all of which are going to be things you should easily throw into the sets of tasks an agentic workload might do. Cherry-picking just the compiler benchmarks instead of all of SPECint... again, it just raises a couple of eyebrows.
[1] To be honest, I'm kinda surprised that both gcc and llvm are in SPEC cpu2026.
torginus · · focus · HN ↗
The former implies per core memory bandwidth is probably not great, meaning SQLite wont perform as well, the latter meaning FP workloads are better done on the GPU, so video encoding wont be a high point. The idea is to run branchy integer workloads that fit into RAM imo, which is what these benchmarks measure.