@futurebird In computer science terms, we’ll say a particular task is “compute bound” (or CPU bound), “memory bound,” or “I/O bound.” It’s a shorthand way of identifying whatever the limiting factor is.
When AWS brought us into the “infrastructure as a service” (IaaS) era, before long they offered different categories of virtual servers for each type of workload.
“Compute” in the way you describe is somewhat new but only a short hop from how we’ve been talking about IaaS for a while.