These disqualified results, mainly affecting Intel Xeon processors, particularly older versions, will remain in SPEC's database for archival purposes but will no longer be actively published. Investigations indicated that these targeted optimizations could lead to up to a 9% performance improvement in certain scenarios, including a 4% increase in SPECint speed metrics.

The issue was specific to Intel oneAPI versions 2022.0 through 2023.0, with no impact on versions before 2022.0 or after 2023.0. Notably, the fourth-generation Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids processors were the most affected. Intel has corrected this by removing the contentious optimizations in the version 2023.2.3 of the compiler, which is intended for use with the newer fifth-generation Xeon Emerald Rapids processors.

SPEC, an authoritative entity founded in 1988 for benchmarking application performance, comprises members from academia, research, and the IT industry. The SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark suite, consisting of 43 tests in four categories, is designed to assess the CPU subsystem's performance, including both integer and floating-point operations and their concurrency capabilities.