From the article -- "Unfortunately, there’s been a trend of uneven performance across cores as manufacturers try to make their chips best at everything, and use different core setups to cover more bases."

I don't find this unfortunate. Engineering is compromise and being able to make things that do a particular thing well can get you more performance per $ and per watt than you might otherwise see. The whole GPU thing that kneecapped Intel[1] is an example I use of how a compute element optimized for one thing can boost overall system performance.

I have worked on a number of bits of code for "big/little" ARM chips and while it does make scheduling more complex, overall we've been able to deliver more capability per $ and per watt. That is perhaps more important in portable systems but it works in data centers too.

I had an interesting discussion inside Google about storage and whether or not using a full up motherboard for GFS nodes was ideal. The prevailing argument at the time was uniformity of "nodes" meant everything was software, nodes could be swapped at will and you could write software to do what ever you needed. But when it comes to efficiency, which is to say what percentage of available resource is used to deliver the services, you found a lost of wasted watts/cpu cycles. All depends on what part of the engineering design space you are trying to optimize.

[1] The "kneecapped" situation is that since the PC/AT (80286) on, Intel generally made the most margin of all the chips that went into a complete system. Now that it is often NVIDIA.