Over the years, specific sets of configurations have become the de facto standard, independent of the hardware vendor, operating system, or database version. To simplify certification, these configuration examples are used as a default. Any deviation from this default needs to be stated explicitly.

However, as hardware and technology architectures evolve, the defaults are also subject to changes. The default configurations and major changes are described below.

Codepage
To come in line with the overall move of SAP applications to Unicode, the SAP Standard Application Benchmarks use Unicode from January 1, 2009 onwards. Prior to that, some of the benchmarks used the Latin-1 code page, and if Unicode was used in these benchmarks, a special mention was made on the benchmark certificate. For other benchmarks, e.g. the Enterprise Portal benchmarks, there was no need to mention Unicode explicitly on the certificate as no other option was possible.
Note that for the ERP benchmarks, in particular the SD benchmark, Unicode is explicitly mentioned on the certificate for a transition period of one year, i.e. throughout 2009.

32-bit/64-bit software version
Early SAP software releases supported only 32-bit versions of operating systems and databases. With improved hardware capabilities 64-bit versions of OS and DB software are supported and thus the SAP software can run on 64-bit versions of OS and DB as well. SAP software on 64-bit Unix versions has been available since 1999, and became default in 2001. 64-bit Windows and Linux versions became available in 2002.
In the benchmark environment whether 32-bit or 64-bit versions are used, strongly depends on the SAP release and the processor type.
As a general rule, you could say that as of mySAP ERP 2005 (ECC 6.0) and SAP NetWeaver 2004s the default used is 64-bit. Before that time, roughly since 1999 there was a coexistence of benchmarks run on either version, predominantly depending on processor type. In this interim period there were processors that used only 32-bit, only 64-bit, and some that supported both. As a consequence, the benchmark certificates detailed the use of 32-bit and 64-bit, respectively, if the processor supported both versions. When a benchmark was run on a processor that supported only one of the versions, it was not specifically mentioned, as there was no option for the submitter.