The comparison at least in the abstract is energy efficiency. It's quite likely that a small in order CPU is very good at chasing dependent pointers around the

The comparison at least in the abstract is energy efficiency. It's quite likely that a small in order CPU is very good at chasing dependent pointers around the heap for its power consumption. Imagine a linked list. Each pointer access is likely to miss to main memory, and no concurrency is possible. Both the highest and lowest end cores will sit around making a single request every 80ns. They claim that the comparison was to the best alternative and I'd probably take them at their word barring any specific evidence.