Application-based benchmarks perform tasks inside commercially available programs. They're extremely useful for determining relative performance within a given platform, and less useful for ranking performance among machines that use different processor architectures. The BYTEmark suite forces a system to perform carefully chosen operations natively and in isolation, that is, without assistance from an advanced operating system or other system resources such as a fast hard drive or enhanced video subsystem. Application benchmarks may show that a computer system is fast or slow, but the BYTEmark tests can help determine if the change in performance is due to extra memory or a faster processor, for example. A lot of it has to do with how the compilers generate code for this test.
Compilers generate code based on their knowledge of the target processor's architecture.
They use this information to produce machine code that implements the algorithm most efficiently. Yes, because they take advantage of the processor architecture.