Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know (2012)
The % of programmers that <i>actually</i> need to know any of these numbers is tiny. I've done plenty of optimizations for performance-critical systems and have never known any of these numbers. Certainly, I know general principles like "disk is a lot slower than memory" and "don't block the UI on a network call". But knowing whether an L1 cache read is 0.5ns or 5ns has never been necessary. You can optimize so much "highly optimized" code out there without those numbers. I'm sure there are <i>some</i> people that have to know that stuff, maybe a couple people on an AAA video game title, or computer engineers at Intel. But it's the exception and not the norm.