John Carmack is hardly an unbiased source. In any case, if your program is waiting on network or file I/O, who cares whether the CPU could have executed one FL

John Carmack is hardly an unbiased source. In any case, if your program is waiting on network or file I/O, who cares whether the CPU could have executed one FLOP's worth of bytecode or 9.75 million FLOPs worth of native instructions in the meantime?