Although it's probably not at all what that author meant, there is a way in which throughput and latency have a kind of fractally-layered relationship. For exam

Although it's probably not at all what that author meant, there is a way in which throughput and latency have a kind of fractally-layered relationship. For example, if you have a distributed computation that requires all parts to be finished before any result is returned, your throughput is dependent on the average latency for each part being consistently low. If one of them gets stuck it becomes a huge bottleneck, and speeding up the rest won't matter. And at the lowest levels of optimization a similar concern arises when CPU throughput is ultimately concerned with avoiding unnecessary latency such as cache misses. For modern systems, latency seems to be increasingly important, as the fast paths have all grown various asynchronous aspects. For some systems 60ms pause might be fine, for others 2ms might be way too much. It's definitely a "what scale are you thinking about" kind of thing.