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't know about ARM, but I'd guess they probably something like a team of 200-300 people on working on each revision.There's no way a team of 10 or so grad students can hope to out-optimize them.
Also SPEC isn't a synthetic benchmark, it contains real applications like bzip2 and gcc.
The problem with SPEC is it is a 1990's workstation benchmark suite... should my cell phone processor's design be guided by how quickly it can compile ia32 code? Or simulate quantum computers?
Sure, that's fair. I was just pedantic about the precise meaning of a "synthetic" benchmarks, which is a benchmark generated to mimic real code but isn't a real/useful application by itself.
Also SPEC isn't a synthetic benchmark, it contains real applications like bzip2 and gcc.