Claude Opus 5.5 designed a processor faster and smaller than the human-made one on the HWE benchmark

Every model starts with the same basic processor design and tries to improve it over several rounds. The results are scored on two things: speed (how fast the chip runs a standard test program called CoreMark, where higher is better) and size (how much space the chip takes up, where smaller is better). For comparison, there's a well-known processor designed by human engineers, called VexRiscv.