I've had a disdain for SPEC benchmarks for a long time. It was always what workstation makers or Apple (PowerPC Apple) used to show how much faster their chips were than Intel-even though it never really panned out.

Would a more AWS-oriented benchmark suite make more sense? Test Java, run PHP/Ruby/Python/Node, see how many pages you can serve with Apache/NGINX, run queries in MariaDB/Postgres, see how much you can stick through Mongo/Redis...