So in the end it didn't have something to do with monothreaded and CPU affinity, when you read the comment.
It was just that he was using the powersaving CPU governor which scaled down the CPU frequency on the cores..
Still ... the cpu affinity "plays" the ondemand governor and avoids using the more power hungry performance governor so it has something to do with it. I have edited to post to reflect on tweaking the ondemand governor, but it can affect other workloads on you system.
