It's a modern version of the megahertz myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth#Modern_adaptati...

I think this makes even less sense as we go to 1,000 processing elements -- even Amdahl's law is too optimistic for the workloads deployed in these scenarios (i.e., having an embarrassingly parallel computation workload doesn't help if we still need to access memory, including going through the shared interconnect(s) to do this, while also keeping cache coherence in mind--and most workloads have phases that have to be synchronized, assuming we eventually want to write the results of our computation somewhere): http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ddperf/archive/2009/04/29/parallel-s...