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Memory is slow, Disk is fast – Part 1
TL;DR Hardware got wider, not faster. More cores, more bandwidth, huge vector units — but clocks, IPC, and latency flatlined.
With all these metrics going up like a Bored Ape NFT in 2021 what fault could I possibly find with the statement “computer hardware keeps getting faster every generation”? As clock speed advanced rapidly the latency to memory shrank until we hit the fundamental limits involving things like how fast we can charge and discharge the lines in a DRAM chip. While there is still a lot of benefit left for optimizing systems to take advantage of the huge improvement in latency SSDs can provide, this metric isn’t going anywhere until we get a NAND replacement that does better than Optane did.
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