I don’t agree with his point, but I can see it. For years CPU performance has largely been irrelevant, but they convinced the market to over pay on underperforming hardware.

Intel inside is great marketing and creating different brands of processors like i7 vs i3 independent of form factor pulls the focus away from absolute performance. Getting software manufacturers to customize for your chip again gets out of playing the actual head to head game.

It's really not hyperbole I can confirm after being one of the main contacts at a cloud service provider. Marketing can push engineering and allocate budgets. Everything is driven by "Plan Of Record" agreed with marketing. If you need something done you push marketing to add or change the POR.