> What these benchmarks have in common is that they measure code in which there is nothing else to do except fight over the lock. In that environment the only thing that makes sense is to use a spinlock. Because if you go to sleep, all that will happen is that some other thread will wake up that will fight over the same lock.

That said, his conclusion is in fact just as you stated, if you read in between the lines. (This paper is really about the scheduler, so it's not exactly that conclusion.)