IMHO the nebies would not learn from the experts. The reason is that many newbies chose to ignore the fact that there is no real benefit in optimization for its own sake. Also the examples you quote are "tactical" in nature. They are brain teasers. Proper optimization has to analyze and optimize the structure first. Unfortunately this is nothing that you can learn from these small scale examples.
Just to give you some ideas:
- If you are creating small numbers of devices software development cost will dominate everything --> go for faster chips if you need to improve by just some factor
- If you are creating very large numbers of devices hardware cost will start to dominate --> you may have to go for really cheap chips (e.g. 4bit processors or even cheaper)
- If you need to scale to large datasets you need to apply suitable algorithms. Chances are that the literature offers very much better algorithms than you can dream of, so do not roll your own but go and look it up.
- Rolling your own is almost always more fun but no matter what you do and how experienced you are consider (3)