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Intel Core m3-6Y30 ... USB Gigabit-Ethernet adapter

Danger, non-server hardware detected.

we limited the CPU’s clock from 2.2GHz down to 400MHz

Danger danger, system imbalance approaching critical levels; please evacuate to a safe distance.

The hardware selection and test setup is questionable, yeah. But downclocking the CPU is pretty standard for many benchmarks like that. Would have been better to evaluate the effects of CPU frequency changes separately. But there's nothing wrong with downclocking in general if you want to evaluate effects of CPU bottlenecks when you don't have high-speed links available.

Thanks to the cloud, everyone has access to 10G/25G/100G.

It shouldn't be taken for granted that a CPU bottleneck exists, although from Netflix's work we know that serving >100G from one server is CPU-intensive.

But is there any point it profiling on a laptop? Thermal throttling is a bigger issue than on a desktop, where even there you have to faff about with C states if you want somewhat believable stats.

If the intention was to artificially reduce performance for testing their code, it would have made sense also to run it with just memory module (50% bandwidth loss) and to underclock memory.

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