[mcguire]

"But it's always either reversing one of the tricks above, or exploiting some domain-specific parallelism."

That's kind of the point of a genuine tradeoff: you reverse what you did to improve one to improve the other. But when you say, "we tend to trade a small increase in latency for a large increase in throughput", you have the heart of what the author is complaining about. If you reverse a small increase of latency/large increase in throughput, you get a large decrease in throughput for only a small decrease in latency. To decrease latency, you have to do something else, making it the factor to watch.

[scott_s]

Just because it's harder, doesn't mean it's more important. That's my complaint: the author has jumped from an observation to a value judgement.