Author here - have to say, thanks for reading all the way to the end, you don't always see people do that ;)

I put a spoiler at the top too, to avoid trying to make people read the whole thing. The real bit is that chart, which I think is quite an amazing result.

You're right re building. We're a compiler vendor, so we have a natural interest in what people should be targeting. But even for us the results here were not what we expected ahead of time.

Having written an emulator, the conclusion was a bit less surprising. It's also probably not definitive, as it might depend on the specific hardware (and future emulator optimizations); you even say in your blog that the hardware you use is not the hardware Microsoft targeted.