How do I determine the Hardware & Software availability dates? What about Firmware?
A SPEC MPI2007 result report is intended to contain enough information to be able to construct an approximation of the system and reproduce the result within the allowable margin of error. This margin of error gives some flexibility in the level of detail to which the system is reported — for example, any reasonable choice of power cable is unlikely to affect the performance, nor is the arrangement of the external network, so these components are not reported at all. Some components, such as the disk and the memory DIMMs, are described using a few specifications (such as size and speed), rather than providing specific model names or numbers. In the result reports, the Hardware Availability and Software Availability fields contain the earliest date at which all the necessary hardware and software components are available. So if some hardware components become available after others, the overall hardware availability date is the availability date of the latest component; likewise the ov
