I've reviewed the response here: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10350/how-do-pool-operators-do-their-hashing and acknowledge that the ratio of hashing required by pool operators is incomparable to the miners.

I still wonder what hardware do Mining pools employ to perform the calculation of the hashmerkleroot for every miner? Surely there's performance improvement in utilising specialised hardware vs a generic CPU? (especially when there are an average of 2000 transactions per block each being around 600 bytes in size)