That's true. There's also always the option of treating SDE as an "installation format" rather than "runtime format" and generate optimized code for a given architecture at installation time. Optionally it opens the door for funky things such as generating code instrumented for profile guided optimization first, and in the background/offline continue to optimize the code.

(in fact, I believe quite a lot of Franz' subsequent research has been in areas like that, though mostly JVM focused)