Well, like I said and you said - it depends on the calculations. :-) FWIW, I never meant to suggest he was wrong in any absolute sense, but I did do a double take reading that.
Besides the fine distinction you made about byte-at-a-time, one other way I sometimes try to express the variety is "BLAS L1/L2/L3". These levels roughly correspond to how much "loop nesting" there is, or roughly how well can we amortize the cost of memory transfers. So, L1 would be scaling each element by 10.0X, say, while L3 would be matrix multiply. One might have to be steeped in numerical linear algebra to appreciate that kind of analogy/terminology, though. Latency can also be a big issue vs. BW in "it all depends."
Ultimately, it comes down to "CPUs can do A LOT per clock cycle" these days - multi-way issue of up to 64-way vector instructions (byte-wise on avx512) and so on and what 1 cycle means can just vary by orders of magnitude (not even including multi-core orders of magnitude and then distributed orders of magnitude). But "not always". And it all depends. Part of CPUs getting so "big" is that the "play/drift" in various statements has a lot more flexibility. So, cross-talk about issues like this has also increased. As have, probably, double takes like I mentioned. :-)
Besides the fine distinction you made about byte-at-a-time, one other way I sometimes try to express the variety is "BLAS L1/L2/L3". These levels roughly correspond to how much "loop nesting" there is, or roughly how well can we amortize the cost of memory transfers. So, L1 would be scaling each element by 10.0X, say, while L3 would be matrix multiply. One might have to be steeped in numerical linear algebra to appreciate that kind of analogy/terminology, though. Latency can also be a big issue vs. BW in "it all depends."
Ultimately, it comes down to "CPUs can do A LOT per clock cycle" these days - multi-way issue of up to 64-way vector instructions (byte-wise on avx512) and so on and what 1 cycle means can just vary by orders of magnitude (not even including multi-core orders of magnitude and then distributed orders of magnitude). But "not always". And it all depends. Part of CPUs getting so "big" is that the "play/drift" in various statements has a lot more flexibility. So, cross-talk about issues like this has also increased. As have, probably, double takes like I mentioned. :-)