In that sense it's not saying anything different from what we have been doing for the past 60 years.
The only significant thing that has changed is that power & cooling is no longer free, so perf/power is a major concern, especially for datacenter customers.
> In that sense it's not saying anything different from what we have been doing for the past 60 years.
Yes it is? The essay's point is that "standard" hardware benchmark (C and SPEC and friends) don't match modern workloads, and should be devaluated in favour of better matching actual modern workloads.
You think Intel designs processors around SPEC? (Hint: they don't).
ADD: It was an issue a long time ago. Benchmarks like SPEC are actually much nicer than real server workloads. For example, running stuff like SAP would utterly trash the TLB. Curiously, AMD processors can address 0.25 TB without missing in the TLB, much better than Intel.
The only significant thing that has changed is that power & cooling is no longer free, so perf/power is a major concern, especially for datacenter customers.