point-select is representing a single SQL query reading a row by its primary key (PK)
a workload based on such queries is very similar to any generic key-value store solution, but via SQL
usually a point-select is extremely fast and doing a round-trip from end-to-end in database engine
so any internals overhead in engine code, any contentions, any scalability limits are seen very quickly..
historically such kind of workload did not scale very well on MySQL/InnoDB tandem..
on MySQL Server side there was a huge amount of internal locks around every SQL query execution
while on the InnoDB side there was a huge general overhead related to transactions management + related locks..
the first step ahead was made here in MySQL 5.6
but the real changes came only with MySQL 5.7 ;-)