Much more importantly, an Intel design team has something like 1200 engineers working for 2-2.5 years on the next generation of an existing processor. I don&#x27;t know about ARM, but I&#x27;d guess they probably something like a team of 200-300 people on working on each revision.There&#x27;s no way a team of 10 or so grad students can hope to out-optimize them.<p>Also SPEC isn&#x27;t a synthetic benchmark, it contains real applications like bzip2 and gcc.