Yes it is. Just your looking at the system at a different level. Resource contention is the stalls caused by context switching, cache missing, system latencies,

Yes it is. Just your looking at the system at a different level. Resource contention is the stalls caused by context switching, cache missing, system latencies, and branch prediction. Ultimately these 4 sources of latency build on top of each other to generate all your stalls, and slow downs in the system. What you see as CPU frequency scaling, I just see as my state switching in my program happen slower. What you see as pipeline stalls are just cache/ram misses, hard disk IO latency, and lots of context switches compounding on each other. TL;DR You say "a starchy, tuberous crop from the perennial nightshade Solanum tuberosum L.", I say potato.