TL;DR Hardware got wider, not faster. More cores, more bandwidth, huge vector units — but clocks, IPC, and latency flatlined. Old rules like “memory is faster than disk” are breaking. To go fast today, you have to play the new game. “CPUs keep getting faster every generation” Over the past 20 years or so computer hardware has evolved such that some facts we “know” about computers are wrong. Even among computer scientists, or perhaps especially among computer scientists, intuitions are off target...