you might be right, but there's more to power consumption than CPU time. something that takes 250ms vs 10ms might wake more cores and/or prevent them from sleep

you might be right, but there's more to power consumption than CPU time. something that takes 250ms vs 10ms might wake more cores and/or prevent them from sleeping, might use high-perf cores instead of efficient cores, it might read from storage instead of from cache, etc. i've certainly seen a 10x improvement in one bottleneck turn into a 20x-30x improvement holistically, due to reduction in contention, back-pressure, etc; there is almost always a cascading/multiplier effect, in my experience.