I agree that this article hits pretty hard against a lot of assumptions about how our machines are working.
I also feel like the author is trying to say something about how imperative scalar (meaning 'operates on one datum at a time') languages are causing more trouble than they're worth. Sophie Wilson said something similar in her talk about the future of microprocessors [1]. This implies that declarative and functional semantics would be more amenable to parallelization, as the author mentions in the article, as well as allowing the compiler more freedom to deduce a suitable 'reordering' of operations that would better fit the memory access heuristics the machine is using.
I also feel like the author is trying to say something about how imperative scalar (meaning 'operates on one datum at a time') languages are causing more trouble than they're worth. Sophie Wilson said something similar in her talk about the future of microprocessors [1]. This implies that declarative and functional semantics would be more amenable to parallelization, as the author mentions in the article, as well as allowing the compiler more freedom to deduce a suitable 'reordering' of operations that would better fit the memory access heuristics the machine is using.
[1] https://youtu.be/_9mzmvhwMqw?t=26m30s