"case and cooling"
This points the way to an interesting new metric which would be something like average decisions per kilogram per kilowatt input power. To one sig fig (if that much) human bodies at a constant weight around 100 Kg run a constant power level "around" 100 watts and we seem capable of making a decision per second or so. So 3600 decisions at 100 Kg per 0.1 KW gives you about 4 billion, so our figure of merit is about four billion decision kilos per kilowatt/hr. How much energy it takes to control your hands and how capable your hands are and how agile your hands are. Octopi have more "hands" to control and they're lighter so they can accomplish less.
There's probably a very human tendency to fudge the equations to put us on top. Although given the peculiarity of random evolution there's no reason ants or dolphins couldn't numerically beat us, although selection pressures in their environments means they've never as a group accomplished even a tiny fraction we have. This "slacker coefficient" cannot be underestimated, I'm quite sure a theoretical SQ=50 entity from a slacker civilization could make the human idiocracy movie look brilliant. In that way I think the SQ impedance barrier in the article is much more impermeable than the article implies. Idiotic celebrity news in SQ=50 land is probably about the same as idiotic celebrity news in SQ=10 land, although the pace and individual stories might vary. Humans have entire subcultures which seem to exist solely to drag down the rest of civilization, and that's probably not unique to humanity. The tired analogy of crabs dragging any crab back into the pot that tries to escape come to mind. Some factor of civilization signal to noise ratio is required, not just brute signal level.