Optimization for Area has higher Fmax than optimization for Speed?

The synthesis options, Speed, Balanced, and Area give said results over a suite of designs. Area tends to be pretty accurate, as synthesis is a good job of how big a design will be. But performance is dependent on many factors AFTER synthesis, and so it's really just doing what it thinks its best. It doesn't happen a lot, but synthesizing for Balanced or Area certainly can give faster performance.

(On a similar note, Balanced tends to be the best of both worlds, i.e. it's not much bigger than synthesizing for Area, and it's not much slower than synthesizing for Speed, which is why it's the default. Changing the settings to Area and Speed tend to throw all the algorithms at those goals, regardless of how they affect other things..)