I love this story and it underscores something I've come to believe very strongly as an engineer:
Complexity is evil.
The benefits of adding complexity rarely outweigh the downsides, especially when the "embodied energy" of both creating and maintaining that complexity and the follow-on complexity it adds to other systems is considered. Making things a lot more complex to save energy is usually a wash (or worse) because of the energy you spend creating and maintaining complexity.
Complexity usually creeps into systems as a result of piecemeal solutions to problems, marketing driven feature-itis, or attempts by engineers to be overly clever and show off. The latter is incredibly common in IT and programming.
http://www.ariel.com.au/jokes/The_Evolution_of_a_Programmer....
Complexity is evil for efficiency, but it's even more evil for security. The number of states a system can enter is an exponential function of the number of variables and linkages in a system. More complex systems are just exponentially more likely to have vulnerabilities for unavoidable combinatorial reasons. The motive for complexity addition doesn't matter, meaning that complexity increases to mitigate security can easily backfire. Furthermore as systems become more complex they become too big to be analyzed, making it much more likely that major security issues are hiding in plain sight and waiting to be discovered. Black hats always have the advantage here because when you attack a system you get instant feedback about whether your attack worked, while security auditing offers no feedback as to whether or not you've closed all the holes.
Complexity tends to accumulate until systems collapse. Getting rid of it is very hard, since users/customers start depending on every feature and nothing can be removed without breaking something.
The x64 architecture seems to be teetering on the brink. AMD's architecture seems better but we'll see.